


Hope Is A Mistake

by Chuthulhu (Mangaluva), Mangaluva



Series: The Sins Of Our Family [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: AU to the second half of book 3, Ableist Language, Abuse, Aftermath of Torture, Also AU to The Search but draws elements from it, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bloodbending (Avatar), Canonical Character Death, Child Abuse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Ozai's A+ Parenting, Past Abuse, Present Tense, Sokka will say fuck but not in front of his baby sister, but mostly it's Fucked Up Fire Fam Hours, other characters and relationships will be added as they become relevant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:32:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23158273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mangaluva/pseuds/Chuthulhu, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mangaluva/pseuds/Mangaluva
Summary: "Are you here to kill me, Fire Lord Zula?""You'd like that, wouldn't you, Zuzu?""Yes. I would."Zuko didn't escape the Fire Nation after the eclipse. Azula decides to bring him the news.
Relationships: Azula & Ozai (Avatar), Azula & Ursa (Avatar), Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Ikem/Ursa (Avatar), Iroh & Ozai (Avatar), Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), Ozai & Zuko (Avatar), Ursa & Zuko (Avatar)
Series: The Sins Of Our Family [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1664698
Comments: 239
Kudos: 1872
Collections: The Best of Avatar the Last Airbender, The Last Rec List





	1. Coronation Day

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Towards the Sun](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19252807) by [MuffinLance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuffinLance/pseuds/MuffinLance). 
  * Inspired by [The Psychology of Azula (video)](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/568723) by Hello Future Me. 
  * Inspired by [Fractures](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20063656) by [EvieNyx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EvieNyx/pseuds/EvieNyx). 

> I've been having A Bad Time lately with mental health, so I decided to rewatch ATLA again, and then I caught feelings about Zuko and Azula again. You ever watch a 14-year-old and 16-year-old try to kill each other cause their dad's a piece of shit and just get Sad? It hasn't quite gotten me back to work on my other ongoing stuff but it did utterly fucking possess me with this idea and wouldn't let me go until I'd written 22k of it in three days. The concept of Zuko being imprisoned after the eclipse came from reading Towards The Sun by MuffinLance, but tit looks like they have a really epic story planned and I mostly just want to leave Zuko and Azula alone together and poke at their feelings about each other.

Azula goes to the royal prison directly after her coronation. There are no guests for her ceremony because they’re all banished, and then she had to banish the Fire Sages too because the one putting the crown in her hair scraped the top of her head with the tip and _clearly_ that meant they were planning to assassinate her with _her own crown_, but she is Fire Lord Azula, wielder of the Blue Flame and Royal Lightning, so she defeated them all easily and told their burning corpses that they were banished.

So now there’s nobody in the Palace but that’s fine, because there’s only one person she really wants to see this anyway.

(Father never told her what happened on the day of Black Sun, just that she was an only child now, and he smiled and she smiled back and the weird feeling in her stomach was probably just what it felt like to be an only child, the survivor, the one who’d proven that she deserved her life and all of her face. Then Mai had found out that Zuko was alive and convinced Ty Lee to help her break him out. Or attempt it. The fools.)

Father told her not to come to the royal prison, but she’s the Fire Lord now, isn’t she? She can go wherever she wants in _her_ Fire Nation. So she does, into the prison and down the spiraling pathway, into the new, deep, dark cells.

Changes were made after Uncle’s breakout. He’d had a window, and firebenders need the sun, so clearly it was foolish to let him have any. Uncle had had freedom to move around, too, and his former guards had attested to the dangers of _that_.

So it makes sense that Zuko’s cell is so dark, and when Azula lights a flame in her hand to see, it glints off of thick manacles. Zuko’s legs are bending entirely the wrong way, too. Father really did think of everything.

Father’s handprints are all over Zuko now, the old wound on his face actually the least ugly burn he has. Zuko flinches from the fire, squeezing his eyes shut and trembling like a turtle-duckling.

“Guess what day it is, Zuzu,” Azula croons, holding her flame high enough that it’s sure to glint impressively off of her crown.

Zuko blinks, startles, stares. “Zula?” he mumbles.

“That’s Fire Lord Azula to you,” she giggles. “Father’s busy burning down the Earth Kingdom today, so it’s just me and you!”

Zuko blinks, eyes moving from her face, to her flame, to her crown. “Congratulations?” he croaks. He doesn’t look scared anymore, not since she said that Father wasn’t here, and that bothers her. He’s been afraid of her for a long time, he was the first person to see that she should be feared—

(Father never feared her, of course, Father is the fear she aspires to, and no matter what she did she wasn’t good enough to stand at his side—)

She brings the flame closer to Zuko, to one of the more raw-looking wounds on his arm, near where the manacles clamp tightly over his wrists. Zuko doesn’t flinch this time, just watches with a look she can’t decipher.

(Bored, maybe? Like Mai. The two traitors really are perfect for each other.)

“Are you here to kill me, Fire Lord Zula?” he says. His voice is so weak, even more hoarse than it got after he screamed it bloody when he lost his Agni Kai against Father. Weak, but clear. He isn’t stuttering or stumbling on his enunciation, he’s still calling her by her baby nickname on purpose, like she’s still a little girl and not the Fire Lord—

_Ah-ha_. He’s baiting her, trying to manipulate her, but she’s the best. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she croons, bringing the fire over to his throat. It’s already black with bruises, but with a little effort she can find where the blood beats strongly, she wouldn’t even need her fire, just a flick of her fingernails—

“Yes,” Zuko says, “I would.”

Well, _that__’s_ no fun. She’s _won_, she’s the Fire Lord, she’s definitely Father’s favourite (and even that’s not enough, what more can she do?), so how can she rub it in his face if he’s dead? “Tough,” she says. “I’m not here to kill you. You’re going to come watch the comet with me, Zuzu.”

Zuko blinks at her. “I’m going to die in this cell,” he states, as if reciting his daily lessons for their parents, showing what he’s learned.

“Later,” Azula says dismissively, snapping his chains with two quick bursts of fire. He falls to the floor, and then she remembers his ruined legs. “Honestly, Zuzu, do I need to do _everything_ for you?” she tuts, turning and walking out of the cell.

She knows there’s a chair with wheels in the palace. This isn’t the first time Father broke one of Zuko’s legs, though it was only one last time, snapped in the middle of his calf when he messed up and fell during a kata and laid on the ground too long instead of getting up and doing it again. Azula thinks it’s the knees, this time, they’re simply not supposed to bend that way at _all_.

It takes her time to find the chair, because all the servants are gone, but by the time she does the comet is still only midway through the sky and when she gets back to the cell Zuko is still there, lying on the dirty floor.

Maybe this time _he__’s_ broken, not just his legs, but if there’s no Zuko, then who is Azula better than?

“Wakey wakey, Zuzu, the comet won’t be up there forever,” she snaps, toeing him in the least-nasty looking section of his ribs, because she doesn’t want his blood and burned skin on her nice shoes. He groans, and doesn’t move, and stares up at her with confusion in his eye-and-a-half.

“Why?” he asks.

(Because the Palace is so empty now except for Mother’s ghost, and she always liked Zuko better, so maybe she’ll bother him and leave Azula alone.)

“Because I’m the Fire Lord and I said so, Dum-Dum,” she says, folding her arms and tapping her feet pointedly. “Hurry up.”

It takes time and many gasps of pain for Zuko to haul himself into the chair. Azula does not help. She watches, makes impatient noises, and then as soon as he’s seated she pushes him out into the hall and uses blue fire from her feet to propel them the rest of the way up the spiraling hallway.

So_ much_ fire comes under the comet’s light, so easily, and Zuko tries to yell and ends up coughing horribly, and Azula laughs.

Zuko’s coughing stops under the harsh, flame-orange light of the comet. He stares up reverently at the second sun in their sky, breathing like a man reaching the surface after drowning. Maybe he _was_ drowning, down in the dark.

(It hadn’t been dark in the cell Long Feng prepared for her, but glowing pebbles are so obviously inferior to _real_ light, not a patch on the true power of the sun. Azula had been relieved she hadn’t planned to stay there for long.)

“An auspicious day for my coronation, isn’t it?” Azula laughs, tracing a massive streak of blue fire through the air with a flick of her finger. It’s so easy, and so fun, and she does it again and again, following old katas at first and delighting in how huge the plumes of flame she produces are today. The she’s moving freely, sending fire blooming this way and that way and who’s going to tell her that it’s not proper form, when_ she__’s_ the Fire Lord and they’re all gone?

Zuko is watching. “You look like you’re dancing,” he says when she stops. “Are you dancing?”

“It’s my coronation, of course I’m dancing,” Azula says, spinning and enjoying the way the fire spins with her, weaving through the sky like a living thing. Everything flashes around her from orange to blue to orange again between blasts of her own flame.

(Blue flame is better, it’s hotter, it’s proof that she’s stronger, but the comet in the sky is orange, like Zuko’s fire. Like Father’s.)

“I’m hungry,” she decides. There really ought to be a feast, but she had to fire all the cooks and servers. They would have tried to poison her food. But _her_ kitchens are still there, with _her_ food in it.

“Me too,” Zuko says. Obviously he’s hungry. Azula can count every rib, clearly see the broken ones, and when he breathes deeply the hollow of his stomach almost inflates enough to be level with them.

She climbs back onto his chair and uses her fire to push them along to the kitchens. It feels a little like flying.

~F~F~F~

“I’ve figured it out,” Zuko says, nibbling slowly at a red bean bun next to the disheveled, crowned apparition of his sister. “You’re a dream. That’s why you’re being so nice.”

“Excuse me?” Azula growls, because Zuko knows she would be offended by calling her nice. She’d never let her hair and makeup get so messy, though, but maybe he’s just forgetting what she really looks like.

“I’m dreaming about when we snuck into the kitchens when we were little,” he explains. Back when Mom was still around and Uncle and Lu Ten hadn’t gone to the front and Grandfather was alive and Azula was fun, sometimes, when Father wasn’t around. “It was Lu Ten’s twentieth birthday. Mom said there was going to be a big party, so we thought there’d be lots of sweets. We crept in and ate so many that I got sick.” Azula had laughed, but it hadn’t been the mean laugh she’d got later. She’d laughed because they were little enough that puke was funny. “But nobody’s here, because that was how we used to play make-believe, too. We’d talk about what we’d do if we woke up and all the grown-ups in the palace were gone, and it was just us.”

“I remember, Dum-Dum. I was there.” Azula looks up at the ceiling, popping half a bun into her mouth whole. “Well, you’re hardly going to climb all the up the roof of the Dragon Tower _now_, are you?”

Zuko looks at his legs, and wonders if he can dream that he can walk again, but it looks like he can’t. He nibbles at the bun instead, because at least he can dream the taste of that well enough, and he doesn’t want to be sick again. In his memory his uncle whispers to him to _eat slowly, Prince Zuko, it has been three weeks since we have had anything but the occasional sea-vulture and your stomach is not ready. _

“And we can’t race down the Royal Gallery, either, since you can’t run,” Azula continues. “I don’t see why you’d dream about me, anyway. You should have nightmares about me.”

“I do,” Zuko says, “but you weren’t always a nightmare.” _You used to be my little sister, when Father wasn__’t around, turning you into my enemy._

But Father isn’t here, so this isn’t a nightmare.

“Hmph,” Azula says. “I want to firebend some more, while the comet’s still here. Come on.” She says this like Zuko should follow her, but she’s standing up and gripping the handles of his chair, because he can’t. “You might not be able to run a race, but I know how you can still be at least a _little_ fun, Zuzu.”

She uses her fire and the wheels of the chair rattle so _loudly_ as he’s pushed through the palace so _fast_, everything is just a blur between one place and the next, but that’s how it often is in dreams. You’re one place, then you’re someplace else. Now he’s at one end of the Royal Gallery, where there are still empty spaces on the wall for a dozen future Fire Lords.

“Are they making you a tapestry?” he asks. The artist will probably get her hair right, not like his messed-up dream-brain.

“I’ll have to find an artist I haven’t banished,” Azula says. That makes sense. Everybody’s banished, just like him. “I want to see how fast we can go, Zuzu. So you’re not allowed to fall out of the chair and die, or I’ll kill you myself, got it?”

Zuko nods. This makes sense, as far as he’s concerned right now.

There’s the whoosh of blue flame and they’re flying down the hallway, and then tapestries are whipping by, too many to make out the details of individual Fire Lords as anything other than dark pillars flashing past. Azula is _laughing_, laughing so hard and so loud, but the fear he usually feels when Azula laughs still isn’t there. She’s here when Father isn’t, and she isn’t trying to hurt or kill him right now, and there’s wind in his hair, but it isn’t hurting him either, it isn’t slamming him into any walls, it’s just passing him by and carrying some of the hot pain with it.

At the end of the hall, next to the ancient and crumbling tapestry of the first Fire Lord, Azula stops using her flames but doesn’t slow down right and the chair tips, sending them both spilling across the floor. It hurts, but it only hurts the things that already hurt, and Zuko’s used to all those hurts.

Azula just starts laughing again, but it’s still the fun laugh, not the mean one.

“That was fun! I _knew_ being Fire Lord would be fun!” she shrieks, clutching her stomach and kicking her heels. “Ooooh, look at the hallway!”

The carpet is on fire, the whole way along the Royal Gallery. The flames have gone orange without Azula’s control over them, and there’s fire everywhere, that means the dream is over and it’s turning back into a nightmare, any second Azula’s laughter will change and she’ll turn back into Father and there’ll be new pain—

~F~F~F~

Zuko falls back, hands over his face, shaking, and Azula doesn’t get it. Why wasn’t he scared before, when she _wanted_ him to be scared, but he’s afraid _now_, when she’s having fun?

She looks at the fire burning down the hall and it’s orange, not blue, so it’s not _hers_. She slaps a hand down to extinguish it all, and it all obeys, because _she_ is the Fire Lord. She _owns_ the fire, and she owns the Palace, and she _should_ own Zuko but she doesn’t own his fear, and that bothers her.

Father has all of his fear. That’s the problem. Father is keeping all of Zuko’s fear for himself, now, and he didn’t leave any for Azula. (He didn’t leave anything for Azula. The Phoenix King is ruler of the whole world, including the Fire Nation. That means _none_ of this is hers, not really.)

“Get back in the chair, Zuzu,” she orders, getting up and pushing the chair back upright.

Zuko flinches at her voice, then stares at her. “You’re you,” he says.

Azula does not dignify that with an answer, snapping her fingers and pointing at the chair. She’s not going to touch him, not when he’s already leaving stains on the carpet, blood and that weird shiny pus that comes from burn wounds. He’s still shaking, but he manages to claw his way back over to the chair (or finger his way? He doesn’t have fingernails, let alone claws. No, fingering his way sounds wrong. Paws, maybe. Not all of his fingers are pointing the right way, either. So he’s pawing, like a little animal with no fingers at all) and pull himself into it, with much more gasping in pain and shaking and slumping.

“I can’t believe you attended my coronation party dressed like this, Zuzu,” Azula scoffs, glaring at the burned, ragged remains of trousers that are all he has. “You’re filthy. I can’t have you rolling around on my carpets like this.”

“Sorry,” Zuko wheezes.

Azula doesn’t dignify that with an answer, either, just uses the flame again to push them out of the Royal Gallery and towards the Royal Bathhouse.

There are no traitors in sight, though Azula fire-blasts a couple of suspicious shadows, just to be sure. The water is still running, though. She tips Zuko into the biggest bath. That way, if it’s poisoned, he’ll be the first one to go.

He’d better not die, though. He’s not allowed to, not before she gets his fear back.

“Well, how’s the water, Zuzu?” she asks when he surfaces with a gasp, the water around him clouding with dirt and blood. It looks quite striking in the light from the comet through the open ceiling, but also _so _gross that Azula definitely isn’t going in the water even if it _isn__’t_ poisoned.

Zuko’s hair is long again, plastered all over his face like a ghost. He dunks his head again, then comes up with his head tilted back so it’s all out of his face and he’s just Zuko again, still alive even if he hasn’t realized it. “I feel like… a turtleduck,” he says, waving his arms slowly through the murky water.

“What.” Good grief, her brother is going _insane_.

“Floaty,” Zuko supplies.

“_What._”

She can see Mother across the pool, and the woman is smiling at them. She liked turtleducks, and she liked Zuko, so maybe that’s why Zuko is talking nonsense. “_You_ make sure he doesn’t drown,” Azula spits, turning on her heel and stalking out of the room.

She steps outside, looks up at the comet, wants to blast blue flame under it again, but what’s the point? There is no Ty Lee to tell her how pretty and amazing her flames are, no Mai to grunt and shrug in agreement, and Zuko is in the bathhouse, where he can’t watch her dance and see how much better than him she is.

He’s in the bath, which means he’ll probably have to take off those raggedy old trousers of his, and that means he’ll be naked. _Ew_. He needs new clothes, so Azula doesn’t have to look at all of his gross injuries anymore. She wants those injuries to go away, because there almost isn’t anything left for her to hurt, and if she can’t hurt him, how is she going to get his fear?

She goes to his room, which has been closed since the eclipse, and rifles through his wardrobe. She’s done it before, usually to leave something small and dead in a pocket where it would rot until he found it and screamed. Would that scare him? But there’s nothing left to kill in the Palace. Even the turtle-ducks flew away when she blasted fire at their pond after banishing Lo and Li. The turtle-ducks are banished, too, except Zuko.

She grabs some things, checks just in case she left something in a pocket and forgot about it, and brings them back to the bathhouse. Zuko can use whatever he doesn’t wear for bandages. He needs to cover up all those raw, gross, seeping wounds. The one on his face is fine. It’s all healed, so it isn’t oozing all over her Palace.

(She really_ does_ remember when they were so little that she hadn’t realized yet that Zuko was weak, before she’d learned that she had to push him down so she could rise, and it had still seemed like fun if all the adults were gone and it was just the two of them in the Palace. He’d been able to run and play properly in all those imaginings. But they’d just been children then and now they aren’t and Father broke him before Azula even got a turn.)

When she comes back, Mother is gone and Zuko is floating on his back, eyes closed, breathing deeply so she knows he’s not dead, exhaling a plume of flame on each outbreath.

“Did Uncle teach you that?” she says, dropping his pile of clothes on the floor. She’s not jealous. Father taught her _lightning_, after all, which is obviously better. She can breathe fire too, she taught herself how after watching Uncle do it in Ba Sing Se, she doesn’t need that fat old man to teach her how to do _anything_.

He opens his eyes, sees the plume of flame he just breathed, yelps, and dunks his head back under the water out of fright at his own flame. Idiot.

“I didn’t know I was doing that,” he says when he surfaces. “I’ve never breathed that much before.”

“It’s the comet, Dum-Dum,” Azula reminds him, “and it’s almost over, so hurry up and get dressed. I want to go out and firebend some more before it’s gone.”

Zuko just blinks at her, but he waves his arms through the water in a way that does kinda look like a turtle-duck paddling, and heads for the edge of the bath.

Satisfied that he’s getting out and not going to drown, Azula stalks out, because the only thing more gross than her brother’s wounds is the idea of seeing her brother _naked_. Ew, ew, _ew_.

“Wrap up those disgusting injuries, too,” she calls on her way out.

She wonders how much of the Earth Kingdom Father’s destroyed by now. There must be a huge wave of frightened people and animals fleeing east, running away from the waves of flame, but there’ll be no escape. They’ll burn on land or be driven into the eastern sea. Maybe they’ll drown, or maybe Father will keep burning, boil the ocean and everything in it.

It doesn’t sound as fun when she isn’t there to see it. It was her idea, and Father had been so proud, she’d waited until she was invited to speak and when she did Father rewarded her with the crown instead of burning her like Zuko—

(But she _did_ talk back to him, right up there in front of everyone, and he had to go destroy the Earth Kingdom but what about when he comes back?)

She’ll have to put Zuko back in his cell before Father returns, and that means she has to get ahold of his fear before she does, so he knows not to tell Father that she let him out in the first place. Until then, she’s keeping him. He’s the only person in the Palace who hasn’t betrayed her, he betrayed Father and he betrayed Uncle but he didn’t betray _her_, it’s not like he can do anything to her anyway when he can’t even walk and he’s afraid of his own flames, and even though he’s not afraid of her that’s fine because he thinks she’s some innocent, naive, stupid little baby sister, so he—

(”I love Zuko more than I fear you,” Mai had said, chin up even as she was forced to her knees before the Fire Lord, and Ty Lee was trembling but she kept her mouth pressed tightly shut and stayed by Mai’s side, like she had been when the royal guards had caught them.

“Love,” her father had sneered. “You simpering little schoolgirls.” Then he’d looked to Azula, with that _look_ in his eyes, and said “What do you think their _love_ has earned them, Princess Azula?”

_Death_, she knew that was the right answer, the answer his eyes were waiting for, but somehow she couldn’t make her tongue say it and she couldn’t stay quiet for too long, shouldn’t hesitate, and what she said instead was, “a lifetime in the Boiling Rock, rotting away where no amount of love will ever save them.”

Father had scowled, but he didn’t contradict her, and ordered them to be taken away. Ty Lee had been sobbing, and Mai had been _looking_ at her, and now they were gone just like Mother and Father had left her behind and she was alone—)

“What’s taking so long, Zuzu?!” she snarls, slamming the bathhouse door open.

He’s dressed, thank Agni, though his hair just looks horrific, and he’s wrapping all his fingers on his left hand back into straight lines and then wrapping them some more, until he really does have a red silken paw instead of a hand.

“I’m almost done,” he says, raising his right hand. He puts the pinky between his teeth, and then yanks it so it’s pointing the right way with a little noise of pain, and starts to wrap it to the finger next to it with his teeth and fumbling paw-hand.

“Ugh, that’ll take forever, the comet’s almost _over_,” Azula complains, going over and cracking the two other bent fingers back into the way they’re supposed to bend, then wrapping them all together into another paw, which is much neater and obviously better than the one Zuko wrapped himself. She ties it in to the manacles that are still clamped around his wrists so that the makeshift bandages don’t come off.

“Thank you,” Zuko says, resting his paws in his lap.

“Stop wasting my time,” she says, pushing him back out into the courtyard, under the light of the comet.

She takes a deep breath and exhales a huge plume of blue flame. _She_ is a dragon, not that tea-loving old lump of failure. With a flick of her hands, huge wings of blue fly into the air.

Dragons don’t need _anybody_, not traitorous friends or mothers and fathers who abandoned them. Dragons probably don’t have friends at all, and their parents probably leave them behind before they even hatch. Dragons probably grow up alone, and grow to be strong all by themselves, and then they kill something weaker to take its territory, and that will be their home, that will be _theirs_, they don’t need anybody else or anyone else in _their_ home.

If any turtle-ducks wandered into a dragon’s territory, they’d get _eaten_.

(But all of the dragons are dead now. Uncle killed the last one. So they can’t have been that strong, if _he_ could finish them off.)

She can feel the power leaving before the comet’s light has fully faded from the sky, and she can see her flames shrinking, and she doesn’t feel like a dragon anymore. She throws out more fire, desperately trying to achieve the same power even though she knows it was the comet, and the comet is going and taking the power with it because it isn’t _her_ power, not really, and frustration and rage bubble up her throat and sting at her eyes—

~F~F~F~

Azula is crying, and Zuko doesn’t really know what to do with that. She hasn’t done it since she was very little.

All the orange light is gone and the world is dark, except for her blue flames, which had been so big before and now are back to normal, and Azula is crying even as she screams out another blast of flame. She didn’t make flames when she cried when she was little.

It’s getting dark, like his cell, but not like his cell because Azula’s blue flames are lighting everything up, and now that the comet is gone there’s a moon in the sky, and if he can see the moon he’s outside, right?

Azula’s just sobbing now, not even making fire, just tears. What had he done the last time she’d cried?

He hadn’t done anything. Mom had. Azula was crying because she’d just bended fire for the first time and set her doll on fire, and she’d cried, and Mom had hugged her, but Mom isn’t here and Zuko can’t stand up to hug Azula and she probably wouldn’t like it anyway. She’d set her other dolls aflame on purpose, later, after seeing how happy Father was when Mom gave him the news. It had taken Azula a little while to figure out that it was making _any_ fire that made Father happy, not specifically burning dolls, but by then she’d burned several of Zuko’s toys, too, and then he’d cried and been told to man up and that crying was for babies. Azula had agreed, crying was for babies, and she didn’t cry anymore.

Mom isn’t here, but she’d be able to stop Azula crying. She’d say something that would make Azula feel better.

What makes Azula happy?

“You’re still better than me,” he offers.

Azula stops, sniffs, wipes her eyes. “Of course I am,” she says, voice a little choked. “Dum-Dum.” She straightens her shoulders, but doesn’t turn around. “I’m tired. It’s late. I’m going to bed. Wake me up when word comes from Father.”

Azula stalks away, leaving Zuko alone in the dark garden, and suddenly he can’t breathe because _Father is coming_.

That’s how dreams end, of course. He’ll wake up and Father will be there, hands full of flame and new pain. He always seems to find some somewhere, even when Zuko thought he was in enough pain to die already, except he hasn’t died yet so there must still be more pain for Father to find.

He’s alone in the dark, and he stares at the moon, scared to blink because every time he does, he might open his eyes to find that the moon is gone and he is in his cell and Father is there.

(The moon disappeared once before, and the sea killed Zhao and killed the Fire Navy, but it didn’t kill Zuko. He’d floated on it for three weeks, and the sea hadn’t killed him, but he’d had Uncle by his side then. He hadn’t betrayed Uncle then.)

Alone, Zuko floats on his pain and watches the moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the really interesting/sad things about Azula, for me, is that when Ozai isn't around, she shows signs that she does genuinely care about Zuko, but all of her mechanisms for showing people that she cares about them have been SEVERELY warped by her father. Zuko, for his part, usually comes off like he really wishes he could get along with Azula, if she could just stop trying to kill him or people around him for five minutes. I like the comics well enough, but I really, really wanted a redemption arc for Azula and a chance for her and Zuko to actually get to be a brother and sister to each other. 
> 
> I mean, I don't think it'd be quick or easy, I think it'd be long and complicated and messy and ugly in a way that a kids' show really isn't going to do in detail, but that's the glory of fanfiction!
> 
> I'll post the other three chapters of this fic over this week, and then start posting the second fic once it's finished.


	2. The Taste Of Victory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Azula takes a life-changing field trip with Zuko.

Iroh knows he was making things awkward. The White Lotus has retaken Ba Sing Se from the Fire Nation, and the underground cells are full of Fire Nation soldiers now and the Earth Kingdom generals are free, but he _had_ been General Iroh before, in another life, when he’d been another man, and the Earth Kingdom Generals are all so _twitchy_ around him.

So he’s stepped out onto the Palace balcony, trusting that Jeong-Jeong and Piandao will look out for the welfare of the Fire Nation prisoners and Bumi will handle the plans to reinforce the walls and Pakku will handle anything else that comes up, ever adaptable as water. The White Lotus has been planning this for a month, and they have a plan for what comes next, and he trusts his cohorts to carry it out.

Iroh stands out on the balcony, watching the comet disappear and the moon rise, and he is the one who first sees the fluffy white shape of Appa flying in from the west.

He smiles, sighing in relief as he counts off little figures on top as Appa flies closer. They’ve found the Avatar, for the little monk is sitting on his sky bison’s head. Katara, Toph, Sokka—all the brave children who’d gone to face the Fire Fleet are there in the saddle, waving as Appa draws closer.

“I see you were successful,” Iroh says with a pleased smile as Appa draws level with the balcony. “As you can see, so were we. Ba Sing Se no longer belongs to the Fire Nation.”

Aang gives him a tired smile. “We won,” he says. “And I found a way. I didn’t have to kill Ozai.”

“What?” Iroh feels his smile flicker. “Aang… he is my brother, but Ozai is a very dangerous man—”

“Not anymore, he’s not!” Sokka cackles. Toph punches the air, and Ozai comes flying out of the saddle, yanked through the air by the scrap metal bent around his wrists and ankles and mouth.

Iroh forcibly does not take a step back as Ozai crashes to the ground at his feet. The man winces, cracking open a gold eye that is still full of fury, even while trussed up and under the power of a twelve-year-old girl.

Somehow, it’s not surprising that Ozai doesn’t look defeated, even when he _is_. They might have to execute him, just for everyone’s peace of mind, and Iroh isn’t sure if he feels anything about that, even though Aang is smiling at him, tired but hopeful, like he expects Iroh to be delighted that Ozai is alive.

“I took his bending away,” Aang explains. “He can’t use it to hurt anybody anymore.”

“You can do that?” Iroh asks, feeling a chill down his spine at the thought of having somebody reach inside and douse his own fire…

Ozai deserves it, of course, and it is the Avatar’s right to determine such things, but it’s not as merciful as Aang seems to think it is.

“Without fire, he has no right to the Dragon Throne anymore,” Iroh says, reaching out to help the children as they climb from Appa’s saddle to the balcony. Aang is covered in soot and scrapes and blackening bruises, as are the other children, and Sokka is limping on one leg, but they are all alive. “You should come in and rest. They will have the finest rooms in the Palace ready for you, I am sure.”

“I’m sure there’s still a lot to do,” Aang says, even as he stumbles on his feet, eyes ringed with exhaustion.

“There is, but you have more than earned your rest,” Iroh assures him. “A man needs his rest. I will see to a cell for this one…” He nudges Ozai with his foot, wishing he enjoyed the man’s grunt of rage, but he doesn’t even feel _that_ much about his brother anymore. “And I must write to the Caldera as soon as possible. I am not sure how Princess Azula will respond to this, but I believe in my nephew. Once he learns that his father is defeated, I am sure that Prince Zuko will…”

Ozai makes a noise when Iroh speaks Zuko’s name, and it isn’t an angry noise. Ozai is _laughing_ behind his gag.

“Master Bei Fong,” Iroh says, keeping his voice steady, “I wish to know what my brother finds so amusing.” He wants to know _now_, because Ozai is laughing and he has never seen his brother laugh, he’s not sure he’s ever seen the man so much as _smile_ at his own son, so why would he be laughing about Zuko _now_—

“That was your game, was it, Iroh?” Ozai chuckles hoarsely. “You get into my son’s head and then use him to replace me? Very clever, brother, very devious! I didn’t think you had it in you anymore!”

“Despite your best efforts, Ozai, Zuko has good in him.” Iroh can see the children exchanging uneasy looks. Katara folds her arms, looking angry, but Sokka is staring at Ozai like he doesn’t quite know what he’s looking at, and Toph is standing very still, listening as hard as she can.

“Yes, I heard your words coming out of his mouth,” Ozai continues to laugh. “All about good and evil, right and wrong—as if any of that has anything to do with _real_ power!”

“When did Zuko say these things to you?”_ What did you say, Zuko, what did you_ do—

“He told me what _you_ thought,” Ozai spits. “During the eclipse, like a coward. But he didn’t run fast enough once it was over. He was trying so hard to make you proud, brother, but I promise you, he was _screaming_ before the end. He always was _weak_.”

“You’re lying!” Sokka shouts. “He’s your son!”

Ozai just laughs.

“I—I don’t think he’s lying,” Toph says quietly.

“Well done, Iroh,” Ozai laughs and laughs and laughs. “Now there’s only Azula between you and the throne! You finally got your balls back, and took out my whole house on the way back to your throne! _There__’s_ the Dragon of the West!”

_He was screaming he died screaming I ran away I escaped I left him behind and Zuko died screaming and Lu Ten died screaming as the earth closed around him and I couldn_ _’t save him I couldn’t save them—_

Iroh’s hand is coming around and he can feel lightning rage coursing down it, but Aang catches his hand and redirects the lightning into the sky, just as Iroh taught him, just as he’d taught Zuko once and it hadn’t saved him, it hadn’t been enough—

“Please don’t,” Aang says, slumping to his knees with exhaustion, so small, so sad, just like Zuko on his knees so long ago— “He’s your _brother._”

“He is _nothing_ to me,” Iroh manages. Ozai is still laughing, even after Toph slaps the metal gag back over his mouth. There are other voices now, other people coming out onto the balcony, shouts of shock at the sight of Ozai on the ground, but Iroh can’t look away from those eyes of cold gold— “He is _less _than nothing, _and I should have killed him in his cradle_!”

“General Iroh!” Jeong-Jeong shouts, shaking Iroh’s arm. “He is defeated, and we are victorious! There is no need for rage now—”

“Show me where to put this guy,” Toph says, yanking Ozai across the floor. “Aang took his bending, so he’s harmless so long as we keep the gag on.”

“Throw him in the darkest cell where he will never see the sun again,” Iroh roars, “and let him _ROT_!”

“What happened, Sokka?” Piandao asks, and Toph has dragged Ozai away so Iroh doesn’t have to look at him anymore. Iroh can see that Katara is sitting on the floor with the barely-conscious Aang in her arms and she still looks like she’s angry, but she’s crying too, and Sokka is shaking, hands twitching to his belt for weapons that are not there, and Piandao has to catch his student’s arm and repeat his question.

“He killed Zuko,” Sokka manages. Piandao’s impeccable composure slips, his mouth dropping open. “He killed his own son. How could he—I mean, we knew he was _evil_, what with the burning down of the Earth Kingdom and all, but he… Zuko was his _son_…”

“I am sorry, Iroh.” Jeong-Jeong’s eyes are hard and dark and sad. He lost sons as well in the war, three of them. How did he live? Iroh has lost two and he can feel his own soul dying in his chest.

“What do we do about the Fire Nation?” Pakku has crouched next to Katara and is holding her as she cries, and she is holding Aang, who is too tired to cry. All of these children have been so strong, and so brave, and so was Zuko and Ozai killed him for it.

“General Iroh.” Piandao draws himself up, and only years of familiarity allow Iroh to detect that his voice is a little _too_ tight, his eyes not looking directly at Iroh but into air. He taught Zuko to wield his dao, long ago, and spoke proudly of how prodigious the boy was with the blade, and swords weren’t enough to save Zuko’s life. “We know you’re grieving, but that leaves the only claimants to the throne as you and Princess Azula. And the princess is…” He falls silent, perhaps trying to think of some polite way to describe the princess, but he doesn’t have to. Iroh knows what his niece is.

She’s just Ozai again, and she is alive while Zuko is dead.

Iroh takes a deep breath, and continues, because he has to, because others need him to, because he is so tired but so are all the brave children who are still alive and he feels so, so old. “I will set out tomorrow morning to claim the throne from Princess Azula,” he says heavily. “It is the only way to end the war. If you will all excuse me…”

They say nothing as he walks back into the Palace, past the silent generals and White Lotus members, or maybe they are speaking and he cannot hear them. He cannot hear anything except Ozai’s words—_he was _screaming_ he didn__’t run fast enough he was trying so hard to make you proud_—over and over and over, a mantra in his own mind that will curse him until he dies.

He tried to teach Zuko the difference between right and wrong, and he succeeded, and he left Zuko behind when he escaped. He left Zuko to die.

He wants to die, himself, for a fleeting moment, but he sets the wish aside because he is still needed to end the war, no matter how much it hurts to keep breathing. Perhaps the pain is what he deserves, his punishment for living when his brave, beautiful sons died.

He never got to tell Zuko that he forgave him.

~F~F~F~

The moon is there, and then it’s gone, but it’s not Zhao’s fault, it’s the sun. The sun is up and Zuko is still alone, but as the sunlight soaks into his skin he breathes again, and something deep inside feels as if it’s coming to life.

There are explosions somewhere far away. He breathes, and feels the sun, and ignores them. He isn’t strong enough to move the chair he’s sitting in. It doesn’t matter. His father will come to hurt him, or he won’t and something else will happen instead, and Zuko doesn’t particularly care what.

He soaks in the sun, breathes it into his lungs, just like uncle taught him. _In, and out, and in, and out, and in, all the way in to your Sea of Chi, and out—_

There’s another noise, closer, and he looks down to see Azula stalking across the grass towards him. She’s in a sleeping-robe and her hair is loose, but she’s still carrying her crown in one hand.

“You useless _idiot_!” she snarls, backhanding him hard, but Father hits harder so does this even count as pain? It was the hand with the crown in it, which accounts for the warm feeling of blood dripping down his cheeks, but the sting of the cuts is hardly pain, either. It’s just… there. A new thing that’s happening. “You were supposed to keep her out _here_, with you, instead of letting her bother me!”

“Who?” Zuko asks. It doesn’t occur to him to try to wipe off the blood on his cheek before it drips onto his collar. His hands haven’t been able to do that for a long time. It’s just blood. It’s not even very much.

“MOTHER!” Azula rages. “She’s always liked you better, so why can’t she just _leave me alone_!”

“Mom isn’t here,” he says. “She’s in Hira’a, maybe. Or dead.” It’s one or the other, though he can’t remember which.

“What?” Azula asks. Huh, he’s never seen her look confused like that before. “Why would she be in Hira’a?”

“It’s where she’s from. Where her boyfriend was. Father told me. She said he was my father, really. Father said I’m a useless bastard and he should have killed me years ago.” He’d said that because Zuko had felt happy to hear that Ozai might not be his father, and it must have shown on his face that he thought being a bastard sounded better than being Ozai’s son. Then there’d been more fire—

“Father never told me any of this,” Azula says quietly.

Zuko shrugs. There’s pain in his shoulders, but it’s not worth noting. “He told me when he was hurting me. He didn’t hurt you. That’s probably why.”

“Well… she should be in Hira’a, then, not _here_ telling me stupid lies!” Azula growls, clenching her fists tightly. There’s blood on her, too, seeping through her fingers. She has sharp nails. Maybe that’s what cut him, not the crown.

“Maybe you should go tell her to stay in Hira’a,” Zuko suggests. You can do that in dreams, right? Just… go places.

Azula breathes heavily, staring wild-eyed at Zuko. “You know, Zuzu, you’re not completely useless,” she decides. “You’re coming with me. She likes you better. Come on. We’re taking a war balloon.”

“Okay,” Zuko says. She walks away, and he can’t push his wheels, so he sits back and looks up at the sun, and waits to be in Hira’a.

~F~F~F~

Azula has to go fetch Zuko and push him all the way to the emergency war balloon stashed behind the throne room, because the lazy idiot was still sunbathing out in the garden where she left him. She needs somebody she can order to push him around, but everybody else is a traitor and abandoned her and Zuko is _hers_.

His fear still isn’t. He wasn’t scared when she hit him, even though she cut him, even though she made him bleed. He didn’t even wipe the blood away until she threw her handkerchief at him and ordered him to clean himself up. He only looks scared if she mentions Father, and that’s no good, because all that means is that he’s scared of Father and not her.

Getting in and out of the war balloon involves climbing, and Zuko can’t. She has to pick up his legs while he grabs the side with his paws, and then she has to sling him in like a corpse, and that seems to cause pain but he still isn’t _scared_.

“Don’t make it too hot, or we’ll go up too fast,” Zuko tells her as she climbs in next to him.

“I thought you learned your lesson about talking back to the Fire Lord,” Azula says, reclining in her own seat. Her hair wasn’t behaving again this morning, so she cut more off, but there’s still enough for a topknot to put her crown in, and that’s what matters. “_You_ light it if you know so much, Zuzu.”

Zuko hesitates, staring at his paws. He manages to get the oven door open with them, but he can’t firebend with them.

Azula can’t stop laughing at how silly he looks.

He takes a deep breath, then exhales flame into the oven. The fuel already stocked inside catches, and he breathes more, making more heat that starts to lift the balloon off of the ground.

From above, Azula can see the holes in the roof of the royal palace where she blasted lightning at Mother to get her to go away. It didn’t work. The woman always comes back, no matter what, insisting that she _loves_ Azula, really, even though that’s obviously lies—

“I don’t know which direction,” Zuko says, sitting back from the oven and staring at the rudder.

“Really, Zuzu, you _could_ look at a map of the Fire Nation every now and then,” Azula sighs. “East. It’s an eastern island, quite far from the capital. Hurry along, Zuzu, I haven’t got all day!”

It’s pretty funny watching him paw at the rudder, too. Once they’re pointing the right way, he shuffles back over to face the oven, staring into the flames with a placid expression. “What are you smiling about?” Azula demands.

“Do you meditate?” he asks. “Uncle taught me to meditate every day. I can’t do it in my cell, though, because it’s too deep to tell when the sun’s coming up.”

“Ugh, no,” Azula scoffs. “I’m sure he taught you to brew tea too, didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Zuko says, and doesn’t seem to recognize what a scathing insult this is. “Uncle was like a real father to me.”

“Yes, well, you betrayed him too, remember?” Azula inspects her nails, affecting boredom, but quickly frustrated by noticing chips in her nail polish. She doesn’t know where the polish is kept. Servants are supposed to know that kind of thing, but servants are traitors. They’d probably poison her nail polish. “I would stick with Mother dear’s ex-boyfriend. He’s the only father you haven’t betrayed yet.”

Zuko stares into the fire. He isn’t smiling anymore. That should feel like victory, but it doesn’t.

~F~F~F~

The flight from Ba Sing Se to Caldera City is mostly quiet. They’re all exhausted from the previous day’s fighting and a fitful night’s sleep. They’d been offered separate rooms, but when Katara had set the already-sleeping Aang down in the huge, soft guest bed, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to walk away and let him out of her sight again, so she’d collapsed next to him, and Sokka had let himself fall over next to _her_, and Toph flopped over on Aang’s other side, all of them covering the clean sheets in soot and blood and none of them having the energy to care.

She’d had nightmares. She was under Ba Sing Se, and Aang was dead in her arms, but when she looked up it wasn’t Azula who’d shot the lightning, it was Ozai, and when she looked down, it was Zuko’s corpse, mouth open, still screaming.

Zuko’s been—Zuko _was_ hunting them since the day they found Aang, burning down towns and hurting innocent people to get to the Avatar, and there were many days (especially those days after Ba Sing Se, where Aang was so cold and still and barely breathing) where she would have cheered to hear that he was dead. He’d reeled her in by talking about his mother, made her feel sympathy for him, and then turned on them all.

She hadn’t believed Iroh when he’d insisted that there was good in his nephew. If there was, Katara was sure, it had died long ago. Trusting Iroh had been easier, even though he was Fire Nation too and Ozai was his brother; he’d helped her escape Ba Sing Se with Aang, even stood against Zuko and Azula to do it, so when they went looking for Jeong-Jeong to get him to teach Aang again and he brought them to Iroh instead, Katara was happy to let him teach. It was weird, having an actual _adult_ around all the time, just as intense a teacher as Toph but friendly and gentle just when Aang needed it. He helped Aang overcome his fear of firebending with a mysterious trip on Appa that apparently Aang wasn’t allowed to talk about, but had given him a new interest in firebending, talking about how it could be life, strength, renewal, and not just destruction. Iroh brewed them all tea at every meal, and it was delicious. And he hadn’t hesitated to stand against Combustion Man, or even Azula, when they’d come to kill Aang again.

All in all, Iroh would be perfect in Katara’s eyes if he had been able to stop talking about Zuko all the time. Stories about his nephew’s own firebending training, or working at a tea shop in Ba Sing Se, or how Zuko had gotten his scar—

Katara had almost felt sympathetic again. _Almost_. She’d stopped herself in time. Fire Lord Ozai was _evil_, everybody knew that, and if Zuko went back to his father after he’d done something like that to his own son—

He’s done worse, now, and Zuko’s dead for something he _didn__’t_ deserve to suffer for, and Iroh is so quiet and so, so sad.

She can’t look at him, sitting with his arms folded in his sleeves, staring down at his knees as if he can see his nephew’s mismatched face in them. Aang is sitting on Appa’s head, still exhausted from his fight against Ozai, holding the reins and staring at nothing. Toph might have gone to sleep, or maybe she just closed her eyes to indicate that she doesn’t want people to talk to her right now. Master Pakku—Grampa Pakku, now, he must have really turned it around after Katara kicked his ass for Gran-Gran to take him back—gave Sokka some equipment to make a new boomerang, and he’s focused on that, carving away slowly, methodically, at the new edge.

Katara watches the landscape pass by below them for a while, reminding herself that they really won, the Earth Kingdom is free, soon Iroh will be on the throne of the Fire Nation and he’ll take all the soldiers back and the world will be safe again. Then they pass over the black, smoking remains of the westernmost lands, where Ozai’s attack began and ended, where Aang had faced Ozai all alone, and they pass over the half-sunken warships that she and Sokka and Toph took down. It doesn’t seem like something that had really happened, even though she can _see_ the broken war balloons below. When she tries to remember it, she can remember flying towards the airships on Appa, but then it’s all a chaotic jumble of running and fighting and falling and the screams of tearing metal and falling men. She can remember moments here and there—taking Toph’s hand and running, throwing up a water shield to protect Sokka from a blast of fire, tossing Toph to her brother because she couldn’t see where to jump, falling away from Sokka and Toph, pulling them up from dangling_ so close_ to the edge, jumping at the last second and pulling water up from below as hard as she could to catch them…

It’s all hazy, and she can sort of figure out what order things happened in, but they don’t feel real and they don’t feel like they happened to her. She barely remembers sitting with Aang until Appa found them, listening to Sokka and Toph come up with new shitty nicknames for Ozai while Toph bent scrap metal into cuffs and a gag. She doesn’t remember the flight to Ba Sing Se at all, or who decided that that was where to go.

Iroh firing lightning at Ozai, and Aang redirecting it into the sky, then collapsing. That, she remembers.

She looks up from the water, stares at the lightning scar on Aang’s back. She checked him out with her water this morning and he seems no worse for wear, just tired. They’re all so tired.

Winning the war should feel more like _winning_ and less like opening up a huge box full of more things that need done, right now.

Aang beat the Fire Lord. With all of them as backup, he can handle Azula. They nearly took her down in that ghost town in the Earth Kingdom, after all—

(Except Zuko was fighting with them, there, against his sister, and when Azula shot Iroh he’d screamed like Katara’s heart when her mother died. She’d been moved to sympathy then, too, enough to offer to heal Iroh, even if Zuko wouldn’t let them. He’d loved his uncle, then betrayed him under Ba Sing Se, then—)

“Hang on, guys,” Aang calls. “There’s still a blockade!”

“What? But we already took the Fire Lord down!” Sokka exclaims, leaning over the side of Appa’s saddle to look. So does Katara, and she sees the familiar line of black ships on the waves ahead.

“Ah,” Iroh sighs, rubbing his head. “I am sorry. I completely forgot. They will not be aware that Ozai has been defeated, so they have continued to follow their standing orders. I think it best that we take to the clouds to avoid them.”

Aang nods, tugging Appa’s reins. “Yip yip, buddy,” he says tiredly, and Katara grips the saddle as Appa swoops up, taking them into the chill of the clouds. Appa lows, because he’s tired too, but he gets them up far enough that they can’t see anything but white below.

Katara reaches out, and part of her mind, remembering all those months ago when she was excited to move enough water to catch a fish, marvels at how easily she can feel every droplet of water in the air for miles around. She swirls it a little, thickening the clouds beneath them, hoping it covers their flight over the blockade.

“Should we have written ahead or something?” Toph asks.

“Ozai would have placed Azula as his heir after…” Iroh’s pain chokes the air so loudly that Katara almost can’t breathe. “Azula is, at this time, the de facto Fire Lord, and my niece is very much like her father. She will not give up the throne without a fight.”

“We can take ‘er,” Sokka says. His new boomerang is almost done, though it hasn’t been painted. “I mean, she’s got crazy blue fire, but Aang took down the Fire Lord when he was all pumped up on comet juice, so we can take her today when there’s no comet, right?”

Iroh nods. “Traditionally, I ought to fight her in Agni Kai for the throne,” he explains, “but I… I confess that I am not sure that I could. Not without killing her. And she needs to be stopped, but she is still my niece and a child.”

_I cannot bury another child_, he does not say.

Azula is terrifying. She’s a monster. She’s no more a child than Katara feels. Aang might not have killed Ozai, but Katara knows that she and Sokka and Toph killed Fire Nation soldiers yesterday. Some of those ships exploded as they fell, and not all of the soldiers who fell from them went into the sea. Even those who did, falling from so high… it wouldn’t be any different from hitting the land.

She doesn’t know how many people she killed yesterday, and she wishes Aang had let Iroh kill Ozai, and she’s willing to kill Azula if that’s what it takes to keep the people she loves safe and end the war. She won’t let Azula hurt Aang again.

“But since Aang’s the Avatar, if we kick her ass all together, he can still step in and say you’re the Fire Lord now, right?” Toph asks. “Hey, could he make _me_ Fire Lord?”

Iroh manages a slight twinge of a muscle that might be a smile when it grows up. “I have no doubt that you would make a fine Leader, o mighty Melon Lord, but as you are not a firebender, your claim would be somewhat contentious. The first Fire Lord, who united our islands, is said to have been the son of Agni, and that his descendants carry the flames of the sun itself in our veins.” He holds out his hands, lighting a small flame in each one. “To place one not of Agni’s blood on the Dragon Throne would be a terrible insult to the people of the Fire Nation, and one who is not even a firebender? Unthinkable. We would tear ourselves apart in a war against ourselves too terrible to speak of. I may have been declared a traitor under Ozai’s reign, but I am of the royal blood and I was, once, the Crown Prince, expected to become the Fire Lord after my father’s death.” His expression darkens again. “I should have killed Ozai then.”

“What, did he kill your dad too?” Sokka asks. Toph slugs him. “What? Like it would be out of character!”

Iroh grimaces. “Had I… put any thought to it, I likely would have drawn the same conclusion,” he says at length. “But my son had died not long before, and I was selfish in my grief. I did not care that my father was dead, or that my throne had been stolen out from under me. I did not care what my brother would do to the Fire Nation… or to his own family.” His expression hardens. “I will not make that mistake again.”

“I didn’t know you had a son.” Katara tries to think back, but in all the time he spent talking about Zuko, he never once mentioned a son.

Iroh blinks, and that grief is back, that terrible, all-consuming grief. “Lu Ten.” Just saying his name sounds like it drains the life from Iroh, who is already old but looks so, so much older now.

“His death was why you broke the siege of Ba Sing Se, right?” Toph says. “I heard my parents talking about it at a fancy dinner once. What? I know you’re all looking at me,” she adds. “Look, all that fancy _etiquette_ my parents are so picky about might be a load of bog water, but I still have some _manners_. Unlike _some_ people, I don’t go around starting conversations about other people’s dead relatives.” She reaches a hand out to hold Iroh’s, more tenderly than anybody who’s only seen her fight would think possible. “I’m sorry you lost him, Uncle.”

“I doubt your parents were sorry when they spoke of his death,” Iroh sighs, “but thank you, Toph. He was a good man, and a good soldier, inasmuch as it is possible to be both. He was very brave, and I am sure that the Earth Kingdom celebrated his passing.”

“But yesterday, you saved Ba Sing Se,” Aang asks, twisting around. “After losing your son there, it’s wonderful that you could forgive them like that.”

Iroh strokes his beard, a familiar tic that Katara hasn’t seen in the past couple of days. It’s kind of soothing. “I do not know that forgiveness had anything to do with it. Simply understanding. He was a soldier, and we were in a war. I killed their soldiers, because that is war. And they killed mine, because that is war. I destroyed their walls, and they defended their city. And because of all of these things, my son died. Perhaps he would not have, if the deaths of other young men and women under my command had opened my eyes sooner to what an evil thing this war has been…” He sighs. “That is how I see it. That is how I make sense of things. I did not open my eyes in time, and I lost my son. I freed Ba Sing Se because it was the right thing to do, and that had nothing to do with Lu Ten’s death. And… I was selfish, and did not open my eyes to what Ozai was in time, either, and so now… now I have lost Zuko too.”

It’s weird to see Iroh sit there and speak so calmly about killing people, about being on a battlefield. She can’t imagine him as a ruthless Fire Nation General. When she remembers the day her mother died, and tries to imagine General Iroh in that tent, she just can’t put him there.

She could put Ozai there easily. She can still see Zuko there, too. But her mother wasn’t a soldier, and she wasn’t fighting a war. She still can’t understand it, and she’ll never forgive it.

They don’t say anything more until Appa breaks down through the clouds and the caldera comes into sight below.

“Can’t believe we’re back here,” Sokka says quietly. “We planned that invasion for so long, and now we’re just… flying in.”

“I see the Royal Palace,” Aang says. “Umm, Sifu Iroh… can we just fly in?”

“There will be some soldiers in the capital, but not so many as the day of the invasion,” Iroh assures them. “Then, Ozai had set a trap for you. Most likely, the majority of the troops in the capital were on the airships yesterday. And if we declare that we are here because I am to challenge Azula for the throne, they should not stand in our way.”

Aang points down at a towering building in the middle of the caldera. “I remember. That’s the royal palace. Should we just land in the middle of it?”

“That ought to draw Azula’s attention,” Iroh agrees. He closes his eyes and takes a few deep breaths, controlled curls of flame escaping with each outbreath.

There’s flame coming from parts of the palace roof, too.

The huge courtyard that they land in is completely empty.

“Careful,” Sokka says as they slide down Appa’s tail, remembering at the last moment to grab his crutch as well as his new boomerang. “I bet they’re waiting in ambush.”

“I dunno… a lot of this place is actually built of stone.” Toph frowns as she twists her feet back and forth. “And I don’t see anybody except those guys up there.” She points up at the huge dais at one end of the courtyard.

Katara pulls water from her waterskins without thinking about it. “Where?” she demands.

“They’re… lying down,” Toph says really quietly, “on top of the stairs. They’re really still. I don’t see anybody else in the whole place…”

“A lot of the royal palace is indeed stone, and wood that has been specially lacquered not to burn,” Iroh says, walking towards the steps. “Azula and Ozai are not the first members of the royal family to have been… volatile.”

“Yep, everybody’s heard of Sozin,” Sokka mutters, glaring at the huge stone stairs.

“Parts of the palace _are_ on fire, though.” Katara points out the pillars of smoke dotted around them. “I saw it from the air.” She reaches out to help Sokka hobble up the stairs, and he nods thoughtfully.

“Blue fire’s hotter than orange, right?” he points out. “So maybe Azula can burn more stuff than other firebenders.”

“That is likely… oh dear.” Iroh stops at the top of the stairs, looking uncertainly down at the rest of them. “These men are dead,” he says, “and they have been quite horribly burned. It is an unpleasant sight.”

It’s an unpleasant _smell_, too. Katara catches her brother’s eye, catches his nod, and keeps climbing anyway.

The bodies are… horrible, contorted and blackened and crawling with maggot-flies. Iroh crouches by one, touching the stiff limbs and examining the boiled, crusted eyes with a calm demeanour that helps Katara see, for the first time, this man walking through a battlefield of dead soldiers.

“They have been dead for nearly a day,” Iroh murmurs. “And their headpieces… I believe these men were Fire Sages.”

“The… the fire sages we met on Crescent Island?”

Katara turns to see that Aang is still coming up the stairs behind her, and leaves Sokka to stop him. “Aang, you don’t want to see this,” she says. She doesn’t want to look any longer herself. She’s seen burned bodies before, she saw her mother’s body, and now she’s seen enough.

“They were all firebenders,” Aang argues. “How could they be _burned_ to death?”

“Azula,” Iroh says heavily, coming back down the stairs. “I do not know why. But I know that she is a prodigy, and she could have dispatched five Fire Sages, if she so wished.”

“Great, well, this used to be your house, right?” Sokka says, making his way carefully down the stairs after Iroh. “So take us around the bits that are special fireproof wood instead of stone, where Toph can’t see, and let’s flush her out so she can’t burn anybody _else_ to death.”

“Of course.” Iroh breathes again, that deep, flame-tinged breath that he uses to calm himself. He’s doing that a lot today. “This way. We had best inspect the royal chambers first.”

Katara put her water back in her waterskins, but she doesn’t re-cap them. Azula doesn’t get to kill anybody else today.

~F~F~F~

Azula decides to land in the middle of town. There’s no way that Mother can ignore that.

Just to make her point, she leaps out of the war balloon before it’s landed, trailing blue fire behind her. “_URSA_!” she screams, over the frightened screams of the peasants milling about as they run to get out of the way. “GET OUT HERE, MOTHER DEAR!”

“Azula!” Zuko shouts from the balloon that he’s struggling to land by himself. “You don’t have to hurt anybody!”

“That’s _Fire Lord_ Azula!” she snarls, scanning the people around her. They’re scared. _Good. They__’re scared of me. As they should be_.

_Where _is_ she?_

“Oh, so _that__’s_ your game, is it?” Fire drips from her clenched fists, and she flings it as hard as she can at the nearest tree, taking some satisfaction in watching it go up in flames. “Now that I _want_ to see you, you’re hiding, is that it? COWARD!” She flings more fire, watches buildings catch, drinks in the cries of terror.

(Father isn’t here to see this, to give her that smile that means that he’s proud of her for doing what she’s doing, and that makes it all so… not so fun.)

“A-Azula… stop!” She glances at Zuko and he’s trembling again, arms thrown up between his face and the nearest fire. She can’t even enjoy his fear, because the flame’s burning orange, not blue, and that means it’s still _Father_ he’s scared of, he’s so scared of Father when he’s not even here and it’s not _fair_, Azula is _here_, and Azula has power—

“_COWARDS_, BOTH OF YOU!” she screeches. “WEAK—”

“Azula! Azula, please, stop this!”

It’s _her_ voice, and when Azula turns around, it’s her, she’s changed her hair and she’s dressed like a peasant but it’s _her_, not the painted princess that Azula keeps seeing in the palace but this lined, older woman—

“_You_,” she snarls. “It’s true. You _are_ alive!”

(She was alive, all this time, and Father knew, and Father never told Azula. She never asked because she knew she wasn’t supposed to, but he still told Zuko before he told her.)

She snarls, raising her hand, and Ursa flinches back, and there’s a loud crash behind her and a gasp from Zuko. Azula turns and sees that the fool tried to climb out of the war balloon on his own, but he didn’t land it properly, so all he’s done is tip it over on its side and send himself tumbling out, sprawled on the ground like the weak, pathetic, idiot that he is. “Zula,” he says, literally crawling in the dirt, “please. Don’t hurt her. _Please_.”

Oh. Zuko’s afraid.

Azula smiles as she realizes that she’s found Zuko’s fear. _And it__’s all mine. Father never knew, or he’d have kept her close, but now I know and this fear is mine, all _MINE—

“Azula…” Ursa takes a tentative step forwards. “Zuko… I… I never thought I’d see you both here…”

“Didn’t think I’d spot you sneaking about the palace? _Spying_ on me?!” Azula shrieks with laughter at the expression on her mother’s face. “No more sneaking around in shadows for you, _Mother_!” She lights a flame in her hand and both of them look so scared—

“Zula—”

Zuko reaches out and for a second, there’s a brief tug on her flame. She pulls it back easily, without a thought, and Zuko slumps to the ground. “Really, Zuzu,” she scoffs. “You think you could control _my_ fire?”

Zuko doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even move.

“ZUKO! I am TALKING to you, you pathetic WRETCH!” When he still doesn’t look up, Azula stalks over to him, toeing him in the ribs. “Wakey-wakey, sleepyhead,” she sings.

Zuko is very, very still.

“Azula, please,” Ursa sobs. “Is… is he…?”

“Wake UP, Zuzu!” Azula snarls, kicking him over onto his back. He flops over, and then lies still again, so, so still…

Ursa is there, hands held out, her eyes on Zuko and she’s crying, she looks so, so scared and it should feel good, Azula is stronger than her, so why does she just feel sick— “Azula, please. I… my mother was a herbalist, I know a bit of medicine, _please_, let me help him…”

“Of course you want to help your _favourite_,” Azula spits.

Ursa just sobs, but she takes another step closer. “Please, Azula. He looks like he’s dying. Please don’t let him die…”

“He’s not _allowed_ to die!” Azula rounds on her brother, lying on the ground, so limp, so _weak_— “He’s _mine_! I didn’t tell him he can die yet! _Make him stop dying_!”

“I will.” Ursa’s eyes are on Azula now, finally _looking_ at her, and she looks so scared—

That means Azula has won.

(That means Azula is a monster.)

“Well, hurry it up, then,” she snaps, stepping out of the way to let Ursa fall to her knees at Zuko’s unmoving side, and waits for this to taste like victory.

All she tastes is sick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I owe Iroh so, so much tea in apology
> 
> I found the Mother-Of-Faces stuff one of the less interesting parts of The Search, personally. Like, I get it, she added some cool Spirit Lore to the story and gave Ursa a simple reason to never go back for her kids that was straightforward enough to establish and resolve in the course of the comic, but I found the messy, ugly behind-the-scenes of the Fire Nation Royal Family stuff waaaaaaaaaay more interesting. Especially the implications that Azula lied about Azulon's orders, and that she was either put up to it by Ozai, or that when Ozai heard what Ursa thought Azulon's orders were, he went along with the lie in order to manipulate her. I'm personally quite fond of the fan theory that Azulon meant to have Iroh adopt Zuko, ensuring that Iroh had a replacement heir while removing Ozai from the line of succession. 
> 
> I also think it would have been more interesting if Ursa wasn't just the one to make the poison, but to actually kill Azulon. It's easy to blame Ozai for every bad thing, but it's kinda more evil for him to manipulate Ursa into doing the deed herself, imo. Plus, they named her URSA. Mama bear. Azulon ordered the death of her cub. 
> 
> So this Ursa never changed her face and lost her memories. The reasons she never came back are more messy and emotional, and there'll be more on that to come.
> 
> I also hope it doesn't come off like I'm demonizing Katara? One of the things I like best about Katara is her anger, and I like getting in her headspace about it. Plus, while they obviously wouldn't show it on Nickelodeon, I think people most definitely died during the Black Sun Invasion and when the airships went down. The show depicts Sokka, Suki and Toph bringing the airship that they hijacked low, so they could dump the crew in the water without killing them, but the rest of the airships were still pretty high in the air when they started getting crushed and knocked out of the air. As Iroh says, that's war, and the other members of the Gaang were obviously more aware of that reality than Aang through season 3. Then again, Aang's gone through so much shit in the last year (from his perspective) of his life, I don't blame him for not having it in him to transgress one of the biggest moral tenets of his lost culture and pile his first (intentional) corpse on top of that. (Getting possessed by the Ocean Spirit definitely killed people but it was hardly murder in the first degree.) Aang's twelve and he needs a damn rest.


	3. A Man Needs His Rest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been a long day for everyone. It's been a long year for everyone.

The Fire Nation royal palace is  _ spooky.  _ The quiet and emptiness don’t help, but Sokka thinks he’d find it creepy even if it was hustling and bustling with Fire Nation soldiers to fight. It’s the way it’s so  _ big _ , covered in harsh red and black and gold decor, with so many dark shadows, except for where it’s on fire. 

Aang and Toph and Katara can all bend water and earth to smother flames, but Iroh just holds a hand out, breathes, and lowers it, and the fire is  _ gone _ , just like that. “Well,  _ that’s _ a nifty trick,” Sokka whistles.

“The most important part of learning to bend fire,” Iroh tells him, “is learning to put it out. It is the most simple and effective way to control a dangerous flame.” He’s probably said something like that to Aang in training and Sokka wasn’t paying attention, but Iroh’s voice is so heavy that Sokka thinks he can hear other things too.

_ Snuff out a dangerous flame before it goes out of control. _

_ He grew up here. So did Ozai. _

_ He said he should have killed him in his cradle. _

It can be really,  _ really _ hard to remember that Iroh and Ozai are brothers, especially remembering how hard Iroh had tried to encourage Aang to kill Ozai. Ozai is a monster, and Iroh is just so… not. 

Except Iroh had tried to kill his brother himself, and he’d meant it, and as a fellow big brother, Sokka’s having a hard time wrapping his head around it. Then again, no matter how annoying Katara can be, Sokka can’t see her ever committing genocide, not even against the Fire Nation.

He can’t see Katara killing their dad, or her own kids. But Ozai did that—well, he killed  _ his _ dad and  _ his _ son, not Sokka’s, but whatever. 

The Fire Nation is  _ so _ messed up.

The royal chambers are empty, but also a mess of broken glass and burned furniture. Maybe there was a fight, but if so, everybody involved walked away. 

They find a kitchen, where a basket of stale buns is sitting out on a counter, some half-eaten ones lying nearby, and that just makes things  _ creepier _ , like there  _ were _ people here and they just… disappeared, before they’d even finished their dessert. 

They find a heap of bloodied rags next to some kind of huge, hot bath. “Anybody else starting to wonder if Crazy Blue Fire figured out how to just make people go  _ poof _ with her lightning?” Sokka asks, staring at the bloodstains. 

“I think we would see scorch marks, had there been lightning,” Iroh says, gesturing them back out of the room. “Perhaps people fled, after the deaths of the Fire Sages.”

“Running away from scary Fire Nation girls? Yeah, I get that.” Toph folds her arms with a frown. “Should we check those tunnels up in the mountain? Maybe she’s hiding out, like her old man was during the invasion.”

“It’s worth a look,” Sokka agrees, though he isn’t sure that Azula will be hiding. If she saw Appa coming, he’d expect her to be waiting right there in the courtyard to fry them. Ozai was hiding because he knew when the attack was going to be, and he knew he couldn’t firebend during the eclipse, and he knew they wouldn’t be able to take him once it was over, not back then. 

Azula wasn’t afraid to attack them  _ during _ the eclipse. She was ready to take on the Avatar and his allies with no firebending, just two Dai Li agents and a knife, and it strikes Sokka that Ozai must have okayed that. He’d sent his daughter out as a distraction while he hid away, and then he’d killed his son. 

No question, Sokka will absolutely be in favour if Iroh decides to have his brother executed once he’s Fire Lord. It’s just so  _ fucked up _ . 

Iroh shows them the actual path to the catacombs, hidden behind the throne room, and Toph stomps around a little bit and declares the place empty. “It’s all stone, Twinkletoes,” she says when Aang suggests checking anyway. “All the way to the back. I could see people in it last time, I just didn’t know which one was Ozai. There’s nobody there now.”

“Rrrrgh! Where  _ is _ she?!” Katara snarls, snapping the cap of her waterskins on and off in frustration. “I can’t believe she’s  _ hiding _ from us!”

“I find it hard to believe, myself,” Iroh says grimly. “It is not in Azula’s character to run or hide. Master Bei Fong, can you feel the city? Are there people still outside of the palace?”

Toph flexes her toes, the solid stone smooshing like mud between them. “Seems like a normal city, outside the ghost palace we got here. There’s even guards on the front gates, but only on the outside.”

Iroh takes another one of those big, deep breaths. “Then I recommend that our next course of action is to question those guards as to why the palace stands so empty.”

Aang nods. He’s been so quiet, and he still looks  _ so _ tired. Sokka viciously wishes they’d gotten a week to just hang out in Ba Sing Se, time to sleep as late as they liked and the chance to eat all the food they wanted, time to just get to grips with the idea that Ozai was  _ done _ and Aang didn’t have to train to fight anymore and they could all just  _ rest _ .

Except they can’t. They put so much on defeating Ozai, and it  _ is _ super important that they’ve done that, but it’s not like Ozai was a switch they needed to flick to set the world to rights. Dad and the rest of the Eclipse Invasion forces are still in prison, somewhere, and so are thousands of other victims of the Fire Nation, and even if Ba Sing Se and Omashu are free there are dozens of other Earth Kingdom cities and provinces that are still occupied, and Iroh isn’t on the throne  _ yet _ , and Aang’s people are still dead and Mom is still dead and never coming back no matter what they do—

Maybe that’s what Iroh meant, about Ba Sing Se and his son. Azula took Ba Sing Se, and his son was still dead. They could have burnt Ba Sing Se to the ground, and his son would still be dead. He could have killed Ozai, and Zuko would still be dead. Zuko himself was kind of a massive asshole and Sokka’s not exactly  _ sad _ he’s gone, but Iroh’s grief is thick and choking, and even if Zuko  _ was _ an asshole, the way Ozai talks about his death, the relish with which the bastard said Zuko died screaming…

Nobody deserves that, not from their own father, not even a ponytailed ball of village-burning rage.

There are spears in their face as soon as Toph shoves open the huge front gates, and Sokka grabs his new boomerang and is ready to throw down, busted leg or not, but Iroh pushes his way to the front and the spears are dropped with startled gasps.

“Lord Iroh! Wh-what are you doing here?”

“I am seeking my niece.” Iroh looks from one guard to the other, and they both start shaking and hit their knees, and Sokka kinda wants to laugh because that’s  _ Iroh _ , the friendly old guy who likes tea and petting Momo, what do they think he’s gonna do?

Except he used to be  _ General _ Iroh,  _ Crown Prince _ Iroh, and right now he’s standing tall and straight-backed and anger-eyed, looking like he’s already  _ Fire Lord _ Iroh, and okay, maybe they have a reason to be scared. 

“Pr—Fire Lord Azula?” one of them asks, peering through the door as if he expects something horrible to come flying out of it. There’s just Sokka, Katara, Toph and Aang, who are supposed to be highly wanted enemies of the Fire Nation, but the man relaxes. “She, um… d-did you face her, Lord Iroh?”

“I cannot find her, nor can we find anybody else.” There’s a huge plaza outside of the gates, keeping a conspicuous gap between the palace and the other big, fancy houses surrounding it. Nobody is in the streets, and when he looks up, Sokka sees somebody quickly pull a curtain closed. It looks like everybody  _ outside _ the palace has either run away or is in hiding. “We have found the bodies of the Fire Sages, but no others. Where are the palace staff? The advisers? My niece?”

The guards exchange anxious looks. “Everyone else was banished, Lord Iroh,” one of them says. “She started banishing people after the fleet left. We saw them all… she even banished all of the other guards.”

“We’ve been stuck out here nearly two days because nobody came to relieve us,” her partner agrees. “And… we’re loyal, Lord Iroh, we won’t abandon our posts and leave the royal palace unguarded. But we don’t know what’s going on inside. We saw everybody else fleeing…”

“The last ones we saw were those two creepy old ladies,” the other guard recalls. “We asked them what was going on, and they just said that they were afraid for the princess…”

“I thought they said they were afraid  _ of _ the princess,” the man mutters. 

“Maybe,” the woman agrees. “We haven’t seen anybody since then, not even when the comet was passing over.”

“You are a credit to the Fire Nation,” Iroh says, offering them a smile. It’s not one of his proper smiles, it doesn’t reach his eyes, but it makes the pair stop trembling. “You have both well earned the chance to go home and rest, but I am afraid I must ask something of you before you do. Please carry a message to the commander of the city guard, and inform him that Fire Lord Azula has abandoned the royal palace, and that Iroh, son of Fire Lord Azulon and Lady Ilah, has come to claim the empty throne. Please see to it that the word is spread that I would welcome back all of the staff who were banished from the palace. I will also accept challenges from anybody who wishes to contest my claim on Azula’s behalf, but I would prefer to re-establish order as quickly as possible.”

“Oh, and tell them that he has my blessing!” Aang adds. The guards stare at him. “Hi, I’m Aang. I’m the Avatar.”

“He defeated Loser Lord Ozai yesterday,” Sokka adds, slinging a proud arm over Aang’s shoulders. “Make sure people know  _ that _ , too!”

“Hurry along, you two,” Iroh encourages the two guards as they just stare. “The palace will be excellently guarded in your absence, I assure you.” Toph puts her hands on her hips and grins that feral grin that might be the thing that spurs the guards into running off. “You should all come in and rest,” Iroh continues, ushering them back inside of the gate. “I apologize for bringing all of you out here after fighting such a hard battle yesterday. Repairing the chain of command and settling my claim will be a lot of work, but it is my burden to bear, not yours.”

“But what if Azula comes back?” Katara says. Her hand is still over her waterskins, still tense, but she’s also giving Aang a worried look. The kid is rubbing his eyes. 

“I think we’ll hear it,” Sokka says. “C’mon, looks like Appa’s already having a nap, what say we go join him?”

“The royal palace has plentiful guest rooms that you could use—” Iroh begins, but Sokka shakes his head. 

_ This place is too big and dark and empty and  _ creepy _ — “ _ Hey, we’re used to sleeping rough,” he says, steering Aang back towards Appa, “and Appa’s plenty soft.”

“I won’t be able to see from the guest rooms,” Toph says, leaving footprints in the flagstones just because she can, which, okay, is  _ really badass _ . “We’re staying nearby in case anything happens, Uncle. Deal with it.”

Iroh smiles again, and this one almost reaches his eyes, but it’s still not quite there, and Sokka is exhausted just looking at him. “C’mon, join us for Appa-naps? Nappas?” he suggests. He doesn’t quite want to tell Iroh that he looks tired, too. It seems rude to tell an old guy he looks tired. 

“Thank you, Sokka, but no,” Iroh says. “You have all earned your rest. I still have much work to do.”

~F~F~F~

Ursa won’t stop  _ crying _ as she tends Zuko’s wounds, and it’s getting on Azula’s nerves.

The rest of the peasants are staying away from the building she dragged Zuko into. One man did come to help move Zuko, even though it’s not like he even weighs much anymore, and the same brave fool is back again with a basket of salves and bandages that Ursa sent him for. 

“Thank you,” Ursa says, taking the basket and checking over its contents. “This should be enough. You should head home.”

“Are you sure?” The man is looking at Azula, and he looks afraid. As he should. “I could—”

“I’ll be  _ fine _ , Noren,” Ursa says firmly. “Go on. Go home to your daughter. Keep her safe.”

Noren doesn’t look like he believes Ursa, but he nods and leaves, and he goes home, where his daughter is waiting for him. He goes back to her, just like that. 

“Oh, Zuko…” Ursa whispers as she starts cleaning Zuko’s injuries. They’re so ugly, so gross, but Ursa touches them with the tenderness she  _ always _ had for Zuko. 

(And Azula. She remembers tender touches, a long time ago, and kisses goodnight, but she wasn’t supposed to think about Mother anymore so she worked  _ so hard _ to forget—)

“Ugh, do you have to keep  _ crying _ like that?” Azula complains. “It’s not like he’s  _ dead _ .”

“No, but… you’re my children.” Ursa checks the fingers, and there are  _ cracks _ as she resets a couple that Zuko didn’t set properly. Of course he screwed  _ that _ up, too. Ursa winces at each sound, but Zuko doesn’t move, doesn’t respond, just breathes so, so slowly. “It hurts me to see what your father did to him…”

“Who said it was Father?” Azula challenges. “How do you know  _ I _ didn’t do this to little Zuzu?”

Ursa looks at her, so much  _ hurt _ in her eyes. “Did you?” she asks quietly.

(Of course she believes that Azula would. She knows Azula’s a monster.)

“He did it to himself,” Azula scoffs. “You’d think he would have learned his lesson about talking back to Father the first time!” She gestures to the burn on his face, the old one, and Ursa looks down, wiping her eyes. “Of course, he’s not even Father’s son anyway, is he? Father told us about your filthy peasant boyfriend. You  _ slut _ .”

(She knows the name Zuko said was Ikem, her memory is perfect, but she doesn’t actually  _ care _ about this man, she cares that Father told Zuko and  _ not her. _ )

(She cares that maybe Ursa liked Zuko better because Ozai’s not his father. She cares that Ursa might hate Azula because Ozai  _ is  _ her father. Like either of them ever had a choice, like Azula  _ chose _ to be a monster—)

Ursa flinches, staring at Azula wide-eyed. “He told you… Ozai, you  _ bastard _ .” Her eyes are  _ angry _ now, and Azula can’t help laughing at the  _ dirty word _ coming from the mouth of her mother, who was always telling Azula to be  _ nice _ and  _ polite. _ A slut  _ and  _ a hypocrite. “Ikem isn’t Zuko’s father,” she says, hands moving again to cover Zuko’s wounds with salve. “I wrote that in a letter because I thought Ozai was reading them and I… I wanted to hurt him. I was so foolish…” She grips one of Zuko’s twisted hands, smoothing over the ragged scabs where fingernails used to be. “Maybe I did hurt him. So he hurt Zuko, just to hurt me back…”

(Of course he hurt  _ Zuko _ , because Mother loved  _ him _ , and she wouldn’t have cared if he’d hurt Azula.)

“How disappointing.” Azula makes a show of inspecting her nails. “It would have made a fine excuse for him being such a disappointment.”

“He’s your  _ brother _ , Azula,” Ursa says, as if that matters. Uncle Iroh is  _ Father’s _ big brother, and Father left him to rot like the traitor he is. “Azula… he didn’t hurt you, did he?”

(He left her behind.)

“Of course not!  _ I’m _ not a  _ failure.”  _ Blue fire dances over Azula’s fingers. “In case you didn’t notice, he crowned  _ me _ Fire Lord.”

Ursa looks up at the crown like she’s just noticing it for the first time. Really. Some people. “Of course,” she says, looking away and focusing on Zuko. “I’m proud of you, Azula—”

“Stop  _ lying _ ,” Azula spits. “I  _ know _ you’re not. You never loved me! You hated Father, and you hated  _ me _ because I was his favourite! Because you think I’m a  _ monster _ !”

Ursa is  _ staring _ again. “Is that what you think?” she whispers. “You think I  _ hate _ you?”

Azula  _ has _ to laugh at that, because it’s  _ funny _ . “Oh, you don’t need to put on a show, Mother, not when it’s just us. I  _ know _ what you think. And you’re  _ right _ . It’s why I’m strong, why  _ I _ deserve to be Fire Lord.”

(Why Mother left her and Zuko hates her now and why Mai and Ty Lee left and even Father left her behind—)

“I’m sorry, Azula.” She reaches out a hand for Azula’s face, but Azula isn’t going to fall for that, she blocks the attack easily, slamming the woman into the wall, and why doesn’t she look  _ scared _ ? Azula is holding Ursa against the wall with one arm and has a blue flame lit in the other hand, why doesn’t she look  _ scared _ , she just looks so— “I’m sorry I didn’t love you enough.”

“You admit it.” Laughter is bubbling up like bile again. “You admit it! You admit you never loved me!”

“No, Azula, I’ve always loved you,” Ursa insists,  _ lies _ , “but if I left you thinking that I never did… then I failed you. I’m so, so sorry, Azula.”

“You—you think that’s enough? You think stupid  _ words _ are enough?!” Azula gasps. “You think  _ anything _ you can say makes a difference  _ now _ ?”

(Words  _ do _ matter, words like  _ failure _ and  _ worthless _ and  _ coward _ and  _ weak,  _ words that hurt, words that Azula’s worked all her life to avoid, words that are why Father hurt Zuko, why Zuko is dying  _ right now _ —)

“I don’t care about  _ anything _ you have to say,” Azula snarls, shoving Ursa back towards Zuko. “Just get back to work. Do something  _ useful _ .”

Ursa nods, starts bandaging Zuko’s wounds. “Thank you,” she says softly, “for letting me help him. No matter what… I’m happy that I get to see you both again.”

“Shut  _ up _ .”

(Those words don’t hurt.  _ Thank you _ doesn’t hurt, and  _ I love you _ doesn’t hurt, and  _ you weren’t always a nightmare _ doesn’t hurt.)

Azula watches her mother tend each of Zuko’s wounds, and wonders what words caused each one. She still doesn’t know  _ why _ he was put in prison, why Father kept hurting him instead of just killing him and getting it over with. There must have been a reason, Zuko must have said or done  _ something _ , but she doesn’t know exactly what, and she  _ needs _ to know, more and more, because she talked back to Father and he left her behind, and she doesn’t know when he’s coming back or what will happen to her when he does, when he comes back and finds that she took Zuko out to play without permission, when he left her to stand as Fire Lord and she isn’t even  _ in _ the palace—

She clutches her crown, breathing heavily, and it slips and she can’t right it, her own hair is falling apart and when Father comes back and sees she can’t even wear the crown right—

“Azula?”

Mother is there, kneeling in front of her, and when did she finish with Zuko? He’s got a blanket pulled up to his chin and he’s still and there are even patches over the cuts on his cheek, and Ursa is on her knees, her hands hovering in front of Azula but not touching. “ _ What _ ?” Azula snarls, clutching her crown, it’s  _ her _ crown, it’s  _ hers _ , the Fire Nation is  _ hers _ , Zuko is  _ hers _ —

“Can I help you with your hair?” Ursa asks. “You’ve always had such beautiful hair. I’ve missed brushing it for you.”

(She doesn’t say  _ what a shame _ .)

“If you wish,” Azula says, her chin in the air, refusing to look at Ursa’s eyes and see them lie love at her. “I had to banish the servants. They were all traitors. But really, what Fire Lord stoops to doing her own hair?”

“Come sit down,” Ursa says. There are seats next to the table that Zuko is lying on, and Ursa has a hairbrush in one hand, and pats a chair the way she always patted the bed when Azula was little and getting ready in the morning and her mother came to do her hair—

“Hurry it up,” she snaps, sitting down. “I should be back at the palace to greet Father when he returns from the Earth Kingdom.”

There’s nothing for a moment, then slowly, tentatively, Ursa starts to brush Azula’s hair. “What is he doing in the Earth Kingdom?” she asks. 

“Winning the war, of course. He used the comet to raze it to a pile of ash. I’m sure it was  _ glorious _ .”

(She doesn’t  _ know _ , because she wasn’t  _ there.) _

Ursa’s hands have gone still in her hair, and the woman isn’t even a firebender, her hands have no right to be so  _ warm _ . “Oh, Agni,” she whispers. “He’s a  _ monster _ .”

“HA!” Azula rounds on her, grinning triumphantly. “I  _ knew _ it! I  _ knew _ you thought I was a monster!” Ursa stares in confusion. “Oh, don’t look like that. Burning down the Earth Kingdom? It was  _ my _ idea.”

And now Ursa looks like she’s going to be sick, and Azula laughs and laughs, because she  _ did _ it, she got the truth, and Ursa isn’t getting it back. “I left you with that monster,” the woman murmurs. “Oh, Agni. What have I  _ done _ ?”

“You  _ ran away _ , Mother, did you forget that already?” Azula scoffs, turning back around. “It’s sad, going senile so young, you know. Now, less talking, more topknot, hmm?”

Ursa’s hands start moving again, brushing Azula’s hair a few more times before starting to pull it up. “I don’t think you’re a monster, Azula,” she says, and Azula wants to laugh but Ursa’s in the middle of tying the ribbon around her topknot and she can’t shake it out of place.

“You just said you did,” she points out. “You think Father is a monster for burning down the Earth Kingdom, so it follows that you think I’m a monster for suggesting it. You don’t have to lie. You’re right, after all.”

(She’s right, but it still hurts.)

“Even if that were true,” Ursa says, smoothing a hand over Azula’s hair, “I still love you, Azula.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. They can’t both be true.” Azula snatches up the crown, placing it in her topknot. It slides into place with satisfying firmness. “Now hurry up and wake up Zuzu. We have to fly back to the palace—”

Ursa’s arms are around her. Ursa is  _ hugging _ her. Azula should kill the woman on the spot, except she can’t move. 

(Ty Lee liked hugs, she was always hugging Azula or playing with her hair or squeezing Azula’s arm or putting a hand on her leg and none of that hurt, when was the last time before that that  _ anybody _ hugged her, was it when her mother said goodnight but didn’t say goodbye, Ty Lee’s touch was warm but she wasn’t like this, so big and surrounding and  _ safe _ —)

“What are you doing?” Azula’s voice cracks, like Zuko’s used to, when he started getting taller and his voice cracked when he was angry and that had been  _ funny _ , and then it had broken completely when he was  _ screaming _ and then he was gone— “Let go of me!”

“No matter what else you are,” Ursa says, resting her head on Azula’s shoulder, “you are my  _ daughter _ , Azula. And I love you. You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to deserve it. As long as I am your mother, I love you, no matter what.”

“You— you—”  _ You’re lying, you can’t love a monster, what are you doing to me, why can’t I  _ breathe—

Azula is crying, and she doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t know why she was crying last night and she doesn’t know why she’s crying  _ now _ , just that she is and she can’t  _ control _ it, she can’t  _ stop  _ it, and it  _ hurts _ —

No. It doesn’t. Azula knows pain, and this isn’t pain. This is— _ something _ , so much of it that it’s tearing out of her chest, but it doesn’t hurt and she doesn’t  _ understand _ . 

There is something else on her hand, a bigger hand that barely looks like a hand anymore because it’s so covered in bandages, but it’s trying to hold hers and she looks up to see that Zuko is awake, and looking at her, and he says, “don’t cry. You’re still a better firebender than me.”

“What—” She chokes as she tries to laugh and cry at the same time, her throat is so full she can’t  _ breathe. “ _ What does that  _ mean _ , you  _ idiot _ ?”

“Made you stop crying yesterday,” Zuko says, and Ursa laughs in a weird way—

She’s crying too. She holds Azula tight, and she puts one hand on Zuko’s, on Azula’s, and her hand is so warm and soft and all the things Azula tried  _ so hard _ to forget are clawing at her eyes, stroked hair and cupped cheeks and kisses pressed to her forehead and warm hugs and arms carrying her to bed when she wasn’t asleep but was pretending to be—

(All things monsters don’t need. All things monsters don’t  _ deserve _ .  _ You don’t have to deserve it. _

None of this hurts. _ ) _

Azula  _ screams _ . She screams, and screams, and it still isn’t any easier to breathe, and all she can do is keep screaming until it all  _ stops _ .

Eventually, it does. She doesn’t even have the air to scream anymore, her chest is heavy, and darkness devours her.

~F~F~F~

Zuko watches as Azula slumps in Mom’s arms, and something isn’t quite right. 

“Are you really here?” he asks.

Mom is still standing behind the now-unconscious Azula, cradling her gently, and she looks to Zuko with eyes that are older, lined,  _ changed _ . “Of course I am, Zuko.” She lifts one hand to touch Zuko’s cheek, and it  _ feels _ like her hand, but it’s changed too. It’s smaller, and Mom was always bigger in his dreams. 

“I thought you were a dream again,” he says, “but you always look like you did the night you left, in my dreams. You look different.” There are lines around her mouth, too, and she’s wearing clothes he’s never seen before.

“Oh, Zuko, my love…” She runs a thumb over his cheek, just under his good eye. Her eyes are so  _ sad _ , just like when she left, but her clothes and hair and face are still different, so this still isn’t a dream about that. “I’m sorry I left you with him, Zuko. I should have taken you with me…”

“Why didn’t you?” Zuko asks. He’s never been able to speak to her in his dreams, but if this is real, he can finally ask, he can finally  _ understand _ what happened that night.

“That… that was the deal,” Ursa whispers, sinking into a chair, shifting Azula’s head into her lap. Azula’s eyes are red-rimmed but she looks peaceful sleeping. She always has. “Zuko… what do you remember?”

Everything. He remembers that terrible day so well, he just doesn’t  _ understand  _ it. “Azula said that Father was going to kill me. Because Grandfather told him to. Then you left, and you told me that you did it for me, and the next day you were gone and Grandfather was dead…” He can ask now, he  _ can _ , but he’s afraid to. He asks anyway. “Did you kill him?”

Mom bites her lip, tears shining in her eyes, already so red. “I gave him a painless poison,” she admits, so quietly that if she hadn’t been sitting by Zuko’s good ear, he wouldn’t have been able to hear it. “That was the trade. Ozai would let you live if Azulon died and left Ozai the crown. I wanted to take you with me, both of you…” Her other hand strokes Azula’s hair. It’s tied up neatly again, instead of being quite so bad as it was before. “Ozai said if I took his children, he’d find us, and he’d kill you both. If I stayed, he’d kill you. He wanted me gone so I couldn’t poison him too.” Her expression hardens as tears drip down her cheeks. “I should have. I should have killed him years ago. I’ve thought about going back, so many times… but I was always too much of a coward.”

_ His children _ . “He said I’m not his son.”

“I’m sorry, Zuko.” Ursa puts a hand to her mouth, silencing a quiet sob. “I said that to hurt him, and it was foolish of me. It couldn’t have been Ikem, we never…” She brushes some of Zuko’s hair out of his face. “But you’ve never been enough like Ozai for his tastes, and I just gave him an excuse to hurt you. I’m  _ sorry _ , Zuko…”

Zuko expects to hurt, but it doesn’t, because he already decided that he wasn’t Ozai’s son even before he thought he really wasn’t. “It doesn’t matter.” He tries to smile, because when he was little that was how to make  _ Mom _ stop crying, to smile at her and tell her about his day and hug her until she stopped crying about whatever it was that Ozai had said or done to her. “I don’t care. Uncle was ten times the father to me that he ever was.”  _ And I threw him away. _

“I heard about… your banishment.” Her hand moves to Zuko’s other cheek, tentatively brushing at the burned skin, which doesn’t feel much of anything anymore. “I was happy… I didn’t know you’d been hurt. I just knew that you were away from  _ him _ .”

“It hurt.” Zuko remembers the burning pain, the days and weeks of itching and aching and  _ pain _ , and the three years of knowing that his father hated him and wanting more than anything for Ozai’s love, as if that was something the man even had to give. “But Uncle came with me.  _ He _ loved me. Banishing me was the best thing Ozai ever did for me.”  _ And I was stupid enough to come back. I didn’t see the truth soon enough.  _

“Then I owe Iroh my gratitude.” Ursa returns to stroking Zuko’s good cheek, where he can feel it, so even when he closes his eyes, it’s still there. That’s another thing. He doesn’t feel anything in dreams except pain, but this touch is anything but painful. 

All of this is  _ real _ . 

“’M tired,” Zuko mumbles.

“You’re hurt. You need to rest so your body can heal.”

“Don’t go?” Closing his eyes was a mistake, he can already feel himself sinking, but he can’t open them again, he’s so  _ tired _ . “Promise you won’t?”

“I promise, my love.” There’s a kiss on his forehead. “I’ll be here when you wake up, no matter what.”

Zuko sleeps, and does not dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to go for it--in this AU, Ursa didn't just make the poison, she killed Azulon herself. Most other details are faithful to the Ursa backstory as established in The Search, including her original boyfriend Ikem and her falsely referring to Zuko as Ikem's son in a letter as a way to see if Ozai was reading her letters home. Which, of course, backfired on her spectacularly. (Ozai lays out in the comic that he knows full well that Zuko can't be Ikem's son, but he starts being even more of a dick to Zuko anyway just to spite Ursa. A+ parenting at usual, that man.)
> 
> Also in this AU Sokka hasn't been to Boiling Rock. He probably asked Iroh where his dad was imprisoned, same as he asked Zuko, but I think Iroh would be more resistant to telling him anything. Zuko really wanted to win the Gaang's trust, but Iroh already has it, and I think he'd be much more resistant to the risk of Sokka sneaking off to try and find his dad if he knew where to look. He probably sat Sokka down with some tea to give him some sage advice about winning the war and making his father proud, instead. Instead of Life-Changing Field Trips with Zuko, the Gaang all got Life-Changing Teatimes with Iroh. 
> 
> A lot of Sokka's thoughts at the start are my own. It's always so weird to me to remember that Iroh and Ozai are BROTHERS. I figure them for quite far apart in age so they probably didn't grow up together, but man, it's still so weird as an older sibling myself. Talk about your Cain and Abel relationship
> 
> Last chapter will be up on Sunday, and then the second part of this series will start posting once I've got it into better shape. I've mostly just got disconnected scenes for the second part that really need to be marshalled into some kind of order.


	4. The Battle Is Lost, The War Goes On

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Azula and Zuko go home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song in my head while writing this was Paramore's "Now". That song hits me really hard when I've got Mental Health Struggles. 
> 
> Also I know I wanted to skip all the spirit stuff with Mother-Of-Faces but I have made up a bit of Lore of my own in this chapter, based on some comments from "The Firebending Masters" and wanting to play with one of Toph's more tragically underused skills.

When Ursa was twenty-one, she fell in love with one man, and then was taken to the capital to marry another.

When Ursa was twenty-two, she fell in love again, this time with her newborn son, and she loved again at twenty-four when she had a daughter. She might have loved more, but protecting her children from her husband as they grew up came at a price that was extracted from her own body, and Ozai did not know or care how many other children she lost before they were even large enough to breathe, not once he had heirs.

She loved her nephew, too, who was like a kind older brother to her children, and she was fond of her brother-in-law, who doted on her children as if they were his own. So often she wished that they were, that it had been decided that she should be Iroh’s second wife and not Ozai’s first. It wasn’t that she loved or desired Iroh, who was more than twice her age, simply that coming second in his heart to the long-dead lady Luli would have been better than facing the pit where Ozai’s heart should have been.

When Ursa was thirty-three, her nephew died, and she wept as if he were her own, and then the next day she murdered her father-in-law. She poured killing powder into his tea and placed it in his hands, and she watched as he closed his eyes and slipped away peacefully, and she checked that his pulse and breathing were gone to make sure before she left. She didn’t love Azulon, barely even  _ saw _ him, but he was the man who’d taken her away from her home and her life and given her to Ozai. He was the man who’d ordered the death of her son, and for that, she would have strangled the life from him with her own hands if that was the trade Ozai wanted.

If only she could have traded _ Ozai _ ’s life for her children. Looking at them now as they sleep, burned and wounded and both so  _ broken _ , she thinks that she’d trade Ozai’s life for a fire flake. A stale one. 

Ursa is thirty-eight, and she loves her children, and she hates herself.

“Psst! Ursa!”

She catches Ikem’s eye, creeping through the door of the izakaya. She isn’t sure how late it is. Perhaps the place would still be filled with customers at this hour if everybody hadn’t fled Azula’s fire. 

“It’s okay, honey,” she whispers. “You should stay with Kiyi.”

“She’s sleeping, too. I thought I’d come make sure you were okay.”

When Ursa was thirty-three, she found her first love again, hiding from Ozai’s revenge under a false name and a new life. They finally married and had their lives to live together. They finally went onstage together, wore masks and pretended to be other people, other people who had happy endings or at least died nobly. They finally had a life together, and every day Ursa wore the mask of a normal woman who had never gone further than a couple of islands away, certainly never to the  _ capital _ , had never killed a man before, and definitely didn’t wake in a sweat every night, reaching for children who screamed for her to help them and then vanished when she opened her eyes.

When Ursa was thirty-four, she had one last child, and it nearly killed her, after all the damage that Ozai had done to her body, but she loves Kiyi so much and pours three children’s worth of love into her each and every day and—

And if Ozai knew, he’d have her killed, and Ikem, too. A desperate flight and a false name saved Ikem before, but nothing will save them now if Ozai returns to the capital to finds his children gone and thinks to look here, in Hira’a. 

She should never have come back here, should have started her life again somewhere else,  _ anywhere _ else.

She shouldn’t have left.

“I’ll be okay,” she promises as quietly as she can. “They’ll have to go back to the capital when they wake up. I’m going with them.”

Ikem inhales sharply. “You don’t have to—”

“I do.” She holds his gaze, pleading for him to understand. He knows everything, she told him all of it, and he held her as she sobbed in his arms when he proposed to her again, and he sat with her and rubbed her back all night when she found out she was pregnant with Kiyi and was  _ so scared _ , he held her when she screamed and cried and couldn’t even  _ touch _ her newborn daughter for fear, and he held Kiyi and cared for her and was always,  _ always _ there waiting until Ursa came back from the darkest corners of her mind, like he was waiting when she came back from the capital the last time. Like he’ll be waiting if she comes back this time.

“I’ll come with you,” he offers, but he looks resigned, even before she shakes her head. 

“Please, no matter what… please be here for Kiyi. If I don’t come back…” She doesn’t even dare go kiss her goodbye, in case Azula wakes, in case she sees, in case she tells Ozai. Ursa doesn’t hate Azula, she truly doesn’t, but she’s afraid of her own daughter, and she hates  _ that _ . She hates that Ozai has such a hold on her daughter, and knows that it isn’t Azula’s fault.  _ She thinks I abandoned her because I hate her. _ “Please, don’t ever let her forget how much I love her.”

“I’ll be here when you get back,” Ikem promises. He steps carefully around Azula, kisses Ursa like it’s the last time, just in case it is, and then he’s gone again.

Ursa watches her children sleep, the children she thought she’d never see again, and her heart is broken for them, but she is also angrier than she thinks she’s ever been.

She’s angry with herself, because she  _ knew _ what Ozai was, and she left her children with him, and what did she think was going to happen? But as long as she couldn’t  _ see _ it, she could believe that they were okay, that Ozai kept his promise and didn’t hurt them, and she’s angry at herself for that self-delusion, too. 

She knows the shape of Ozai’s hands, how they leave burns and bruises, and she recognized them so easily on Zuko’s body as she tended every wound, and Azula might not be burned or bruised but Ursa knows that look in her eyes as well as her own face in the mirror. She knows that pain, and that fear, and that desperation, and that loneliness, and that  _ anger _ . 

She knows all the pain she took for her children. In her absence, where did she think it was going to go?

She has so much pain to make up for.

Azulon’s poison was painless. If Ursa has any say in it, Ozai’s death won’t be.

~F~F~F~

Azula rises with the sun. 

The first thing she sees is Zuko. This is not something she is accustomed to seeing in the mornings. He’s just opening his eyes too, because he  _ is _ a firebender, if a lackluster excuse for one. He’s lying on a table, but whatever Azula’s lying on, it’s warm and soft. 

“You’re still here,” Zuko says, looking at Azula, then looking up. “You’re still real.”

“I’m still real.”

Azula is on her feet as shock rips down her spine like lightning at the sound of  _ that _ voice. “ _ You! _ ”

“Good morning, Azula,” Ursa says, and she even dares to  _ smile _ , like she isn’t—like she  _ didn’t _ —

“What did you  _ do _ to me?” Azula rasps out. Her throat  _ hurts _ . 

(She knew it would hurt, sooner or later.)

“I’m not leaving you behind again,” Ursa says, holding a hand out to Azula. “When you go back to the capital, I’m coming with you.”

“Oh? You  _ are _ , are you?” Azula laughs. “I’m sure  _ Father _ will be  _ so  _ delighted to see you! What a happy family reunion this will be, hmmm?”

The blow lands. Ursa flinches at the mention of Father. Zuko gasps. 

…but it’s just fear of Father again, so what’s the use?

“He’ll kill you,” Zuko whispers. 

There is a look on Ursa’s face, and Azula doesn’t recognize it. It’s not an expression that she’s ever seen before on her placid, sweet,  _ weak _ mother.

She doesn’t look weak now. 

“I’m coming back with you,” Ursa repeats firmly, and her tone says  _ that is final _ . 

Azula can’t help giggling again.  _ Finally found some strength, Mother? It had to be in there  _ somewhere _ . I never  _ could _ figure out how somebody so weak could have borne… me. _ “Well, come along, then, all, we’ve been away too long as it is!” She reaches up to check her crown, and it’s a little squint but easily straightened. Everything has to be  _ perfect _ to greet Father. 

~F~F~F~

The Palace is full of Fire Nation people, and Katara  _ hates _ it.

She used to imagine, when she was little, that everybody from the Fire Nation was a faceless monster, a million copies of the man who killed Mom. She knows that’s not true, now. First there was the Fire Sage who helped them, then Jeong-Jeong, and then Iroh helped her escape with Aang from Ba Sing Se, and then they traveled through the Fire Nation in secret and saw how filled it was with completely normal men, women and children. They aren’t all monsters, they aren’t all soldiers, and a lot of them have simply been lied to. They don’t  _ know _ what Ozai really is, or what their armies have been doing overseas. They don’t know  _ anything _ .

But the people who live and work in this palace do. They  _ have _ to. They’d have seen Ozai every day, and Katara grew up in a small enough community to know that you can’t see someone every day for years without knowing, on some level, who they really are. Sometimes people try to ignore things, because they love someone, or don’t want to believe that somebody they’ve grown up with is a monster, but that’s what elders like Gran-Gran are for. They’re old and wise and they  _ know _ what will happen if you let a monster in human skin live among normal people for too long. 

The Fire Nation doesn’t seem to have that. The Sages had been old men, mostly, but they betrayed Aang to Ozai. Iroh is older than Ozai, but Ozai took his throne years ago and Iroh didn’t stop him then. He admitted to knowing what Ozai was, and still didn’t think to kill him until after Zuko was already dead.

Some of the stream of advisers and generals that Iroh introduced them to this morning are elders, and none of them did  _ anything _ to stop Ozai. 

The Fire Nation may not be made of monsters, but it’s full of people who feed them. 

They’re not even doing anything  _ useful _ . They’re just arguing.

“I can’t believe they’re  _ still _ mad about Ba Sing Se,” Sokka groans. He’s lying on the walkway at the back of the room where a lot of people who Iroh has insisted are important have clustered, most of them shouting. Katara doesn’t like working on her brother’s leg in front of them all—it feels like advertising weakness—but Aang wants to sit in and hear what’s going on, and she’s  _ not _ leaving him alone here with these people. Toph is outside with Appa, ready to alert them if anybody else comes up to the palace, and Katara trusts her even if she doesn’t trust all the guards and servants who’ve returned, regardless of their pledges of loyalty to Iroh. 

“They actually stopped yelling about that a while ago,” Aang says quietly. “Well, I think it’s still sort of about that, but now it’s about how to get all the Fire Nation soldiers from the Earth Kingdom to here.” He rubs his eyes with a tired sigh. He slept deeply last night, but he still looks so  _ exhausted _ . “I didn’t know ending a war was so  _ hard _ .”

“Yeah, this is boring and complicated, but I like how it involves a lot less nearly-dying than fighting Ozai,” Sokka comments. It’s true. Iroh cautioned them that he might have to fend off some challenges, and that they aren’t to step in if that happens, but it hasn’t. Some people don’t look  _ happy _ to see Iroh, but they haven’t challenged him. Others seem positively delighted, insisting that he should have been Fire Lord all along. For all the arguing, whenever Iroh speaks,  _ all _ of them shut up and listen. 

It’s another new Iroh, not the friendly, tea-brewing teacher that Aang’s been working with for months, or the one made of blazing anger that nearly killed Ozai, or the dragging force of dark grief who traveled with them all day yesterday. She’s seen a lot of new Irohs over the last couple of days. This one is stern, commanding, as unflappable as a stone statue, and hasn’t said a single proverb all day. 

There’s running feet from the hallway and Toph bursts in, startling all of the Fire Nation bigwigs into a moment of affronted silence. It’s almost hilarious to see them all quietened by such a tiny girl, even knowing full well that Toph is… well,  _ Toph _ .

One of the ministers opens his mouth, but Toph beats him to it. “One of the guards started yelling about something coming from the sky!”

“What?” Aang’s on his feet with a blast of air, staff in hand. Katara yanks her water off of Sokka’s leg and into her waterskins, ready to use it to fight. Sokka grabs his new boomerang and his crutch. “What is it?”

“How should I know?!” Toph exclaims, throwing up her hands. “I came to get  _ you _ to come look for me!”

“I-It’s a war balloon!” a guard pants, skidding to a halt outside the door and then bowing low. “L-Lord Iroh… my lords…” He gasps for air, then draws himself upright. “A war balloon is coming towards the palace!”

“I thought we took all of them down!” Katara runs past the guard before he can get another word in, heading back out to the main courtyard where they landed Appa. 

It isn’t one of the huge, menacing war balloons that attacked the Earth Kingdom. It’s a small one, lacking the insignias or decorations of the rest, little more than a metal tub under a red balloon. It’s still too small to see who is flying it, but Katara already has a bad feeling. 

“I should fly up there and take a look—” Aang tries to reach for his glider before remembering that it’s gone. Katara puts a hand on his arm.

“If it’s Azula, she could blast you out of the sky,” she cautions. “Stay close to the ground and we can all give you backup.”

“We cannot be sure that it is Azula.” Iroh catches up to them, helping a still-limping Sokka along. “One of the banished courtiers might have taken a war balloon to escape Azula’s wrath.”

They’ve heard a  _ lot _ of stories about Azula’s wrath as people return to the royal palace. They’ve been enough to put Azula in Katara’s memories as Mom’s killer, even though the princess would have been just a child herself at the time.

The point is, Katara  _ knows _ every monster in the Fire Nation wasn’t in their house that day, just one of them. But it could have been  _ any _ of them.

The balloon drifts closer, agonizingly slow, lowering towards the courtyard. There’s a small, dark shape—somebody looking out of the balloon—and then a terrifying, unearthly shriek.

Then blue fire is descending at them.

Katara pushes Aang out of the way, sweeping water out of her waterskins as a shield. It explodes into steam as the blue flame hits, and there is a roar from Iroh as he fires flame back. 

Azula drops through the steam, cackling like a witch from a nightmare, kicking through Iroh’s flames as if they’re nothing. She casts more blue flames from her hands and feet as she falls, allowing her to hover to the ground instead of crashing into it. 

Azula  _ looks _ like a witch, too, wild-haired and wild-eyed and she  _ won’t stop laughing. _

“So,  _ this _ was her plan all along!” Azula snarls, pointing at Iroh. “She  _ did _ something to me, kept me out of the way while  _ you _ stole my throne! Sneaky, sneaky!” She spins, and a wave of flame blasts at all of them.

Toph, Aang and Iroh step forwards, blocking Azula’s flames with walls of stone or, in Iroh’s case, a flame block of his own. “Stand  _ down _ , Azula!” Iroh shouts. “You will not win this!” He punches out fire in quick, sharp, powerful blasts, and Aang imitates him. Toph and Sokka weigh in with stones and Boomerang, and Katara feels desperately around for more water— 

“Oh, I disagree, dear Uncle!” Azula blocks every blast of fire, dodges every stone, loses no more than a few strands of hair to Boomerang. “I’ll take you  _ all _ down and present your heads as a gift to Father when he returns!”

There’s more fire, but it’s easily dodged. Something’s  _ very _ wrong. Every time they’ve fought Azula, she’s been terrifying because she’s been  _ unstoppable _ , deadly precise, always where they don’t want her to be, firing attacks that it takes everything to block or avoid, but now her flames are flying loose and wild. Katara’s out of water to use as a shield, but she doesn’t need to when the blue fire is suddenly so easy to avoid. 

“Ozai’s in jail in Ba Sing Se!” Aang shouts, trying to catch Azula’s feet in clamps of earth, but Azula just leaps out of the way, executing a flailing but still effective dodge that avoids more stone from Toph. “We stopped him, and we’ll stop you too, Azula!”

“ _ LIAR!” _ Azula’s scream is feral, inhuman, and Katara has to duck behind Iroh for protection from the  _ wall _ of blue fire. “You did not defeat Father, and you  _ will not defeat _ —”

Boomerang comes back, cracking into Azula’s head. She stumbles, puts a hand to her head, and it comes away bloody, and in that moment, Katara remembers that there is  _ always _ water for a Southern Waterbender to use.

She told herself she’d never do this again, but lightning is crackling on Azula’s arms and she’s looking at  _ Sokka _ as he catches Boomerang— 

“You filthy  _ peasant! _ ” Azula screams, arms completing their arc and starting to reach out—

Katara  _ grabs _ , and the lightning dies as Azula freezes. There is a moment of still as everybody in the courtyard hesitates, staring at Azula, whose eyes swivel wildly but whose body is no longer under her control.

“Katara?” Sokka says tentatively.

“She doesn’t get to kill anybody today,” Katara says as she forces Azula to her knees. The princess is shaking, her eyes  _ furious _ , a strangled snarl escaping her teeth. Holding Hama had been easy, the woman had been so old, so truly frail when it came to her will against Katara’s, but Azula  _ fights _ and it takes every drop of Katara’s willpower to keep her on the ground.  _ It’s not even the full moon _ , Katara realizes.  _ I  _ can _ do it without the full moon, but I’m not strong enough to hold her-- _ “Toph, Aang, you have to contain her, I can’t hold her forever!”

Aang and Toph step forwards, bringing up layers and layers of stone around Azula, encasing her up to the neck, and once she’s sure that Azula can’t move, Katara drops her control. Iroh catches her back as she staggers in exhaustion, then pulls her out of the way of an enraged scream of blue flame that Azula spits at Katara’s feet. Toph’s hands move in a complicated dance, and her space-metal bracelet flies out as a flat gag, clamping over Azula’s mouth and cutting off the flames.

“Katara… what did you  _ do _ ?” Iroh asks quietly, gripping her arms tightly. 

Katara shakes him off. “What I had to do to  _ stop _ her,” she argues, looking around at her friends. They all looked freaked, and okay, bloodbending  _ is _ freaky, but so is Azula  _ killing people with lightning! _

Aang is the first to speak. “Thanks to Katara, nobody got hurt,” he says firmly. 

“Thanks, Katara,” Sokka says, holstering Boomerang and limping over to take her arm. He leans on the crutch, allowing her to collapse against her big brother’s side, exhausted from less than a minute of trying to hold Azula. “Knew your magic water tricks would save my hide one day!”

Iroh lets out a brief, single chuckle, then his expression sobers as he approaches Azula. “Like it or not, you are defeated, niece, as is Ozai,” he says gravely, reaching up to pull out the huge, golden, flame-shaped hairpiece that Azula is wearing. “Please, Azula, do not make this—”

Azula headbutts his hand away, still snarling under the gag, and fire blooms from her  _ nose _ . 

“Okaaayyyyy, so that’s a problem,” Sokka notes. “Are you saying we can’t stop her from bending without stopping her from  _ breathing _ ?”

“If she doesn’t know when she’s beaten, then we need to do whatever it takes to put her down,” Katara says. Maybe a little too harshly, from the look on Aang’s face, but  _ he _ has to be scared of Azula, too. Azula  _ killed _ him. 

“Should I take her bending?” Aang asks, looking to Iroh. 

Iroh sighs deeply, sadly. “Do what you must, Avatar Aang,” he says, stepping out of the way. Aang breathes, too, reaches out a hand—

“Wait! What are you all  _ doing _ to her?”

The war balloon is almost on the ground, now, and a woman jumps out of it, a middle-aged Fire Nation woman who  _ puts her back to Azula _ as she looks over all of them, arms out as if to protect  _ Azula _ , as if Azula isn’t something that others need protected  _ from _ .

“Ursa?” Iroh is staring in true, wide-eyed shock. “You’re alive?”

“I am,” the woman says. She doesn’t flinch even when Azula snorts more flames. “What’s happening, Iroh? Where is he?”

“Ozai is defeated, Ursa,” Iroh tells her, and now he’s gentle again,  _ so _ gentle, and even then the woman gasps, swaying on the spot in a shock as great as Iroh’s. “Azula is not well. She cannot be Fire Lord. We must prevent her from bringing more harm to herself or anyone else.”

“I know,” Ursa says quietly, “but please… without Ozai, I feel like I can reach her again. Please, Iroh, I abandoned them for too long, and Ozai hurt them so much… please let me try to help her.”

“Uhhh, Ma’am? Who  _ are _ you?” Aang asks, looking from the woman to Iroh, who half-bows to the woman. 

“She is Azula and… and Zuko’s mother. I did not know she was still…”

_ The Fire Nation took my mother from me! _

_ You and I have that in common _ .

“Zuko didn’t know either, did he?” Katara says quietly. Nobody answers her, maybe nobody even hears her, but she knows that they are going to have to tell this woman that her son is dead, and it’s so  _ unfair _ . Katara would give anything to find out that her mother is still alive, and Zuko isn’t even here to appreciate it. 

“Azula…” Ursa turns her back on all of them, cupping her daughter’s face in her hands, ignoring Azula’s continued muffled screams. “Azula, stop. Please. You heard your uncle, Ozai is gone. He’s finished, love, you don’t have to do all this for him, not anymore.” Azula tries to shake her head, but Ursa doesn’t loosen her grip. “I’m here, Azula. It’s okay. You can stop. You can rest…”

Azula is  _ crying _ , now, and Katara can’t look at that, because she knows Azula is a monster, but now she’s sobbing like a heartbroken child and it doesn’t  _ fit _ . 

Katara doesn’t want to feel sad for  _ her _ .

So Katara is the first one to notice that somebody else is in the war balloon, and is trying to climb out on trembling arms. It’s a face she’d know  _ anywhere _ , after all the time looking over her shoulder for it, and not just because of the livid scar. 

“Zuko?”

~F~F~F~

Until she was twelve, Toph only ever fought other earthbenders, and that’s  _ easy _ . She can feel their movements, their strong stances and stomping feet like a shout directly in her ear, and she can feel their element even when it’s flying through the air. Then she fought a light-footed airbender that she couldn’t  _ see _ , and realized that, despite being the greatest earthbender alive, she wasn’t the greatest  _ fighter _ , and she had to fix that immediately.

The thing about airbenders, waterbenders and firebenders, is that while she can feel their movements, she can’t feel what they’re bending unless she’s in a mudfight with Katara. So she’s had to learn, by paying close attention to Aang and Katara’s training, and later from listening to Aang’s training with Uncle, how to estimate where the attacks are coming from based on the bender’s movements. Uncle’s firebending is definitely nonstandard, but he’s taught them all how to block conventional firebending forms, too, and of all the other bending styles, firebenders are the easiest to predict. Their attacks use strong stances and deep breaths that Toph can feel in their heartbeats, and  _ that’s _ what she’s learned to use to predict how they’ll fight. She used to have to really focus to hear other people’s heartbeats, but now she seeks them out instinctively, especially when a fight is going down.

She knows her friends by their heartbeats as much as their footsteps. Aang’s is light and fluttery when he’s happy or excited, which was almost all the time when she first met him, but these days it’s almost always the slow, controlled pulse he used to only settle into when meditating. Maybe it’s just exhaustion, but fear and sadness also weigh heavily on the heart.

Katara’s pulse is ever-shifting, rising and falling like the tides. So does Sokka’s, even though he’s not a waterbender, though not so far as Katara’s. Both of their hearts slow when they’re angry, not speeding up like most people. Sokka’s a trained warrior, and it shows when they get into a fight and he’s completely controlled, his heart only jumping if Katara gets hurt. Katara is quicker to anger, but her heartbeat still doesn’t jump, just steadily rises and rises like a wave, the kind that turns whole civilizations into myths. 

Uncle is a steady, stable presence, but it’s like there are  _ two _ heartbeats inside of him. The one in his chest keeps the same calm beat no matter what, but the one in his belly jumps and dances when he firebends, telling Toph what he’s doing even if she can’t see it. Aang has that second pulse too when he’s firebending, but it’s gone when he isn’t, and Uncle’s never  _ stops _ . It banks low and quiet when he isn’t firebending, but it’s still  _ there _ , just as calm as his regular heartbeat— 

Except for yesterday, when Ozai said what he said and  _ his _ heartbeat never changed but Uncle’s did, both heartbeats  _ stopped _ for a moment, and then the one in his belly came back thrumming so fast she could barely hear the beats apart and then the air smelled like lightning, and then Aang’s heart skipped a terrifying beat before everything went still, and Toph knew she had to get Ozai out of Uncle’s sight  _ fast _ . Since then, Uncle’s fiery heartbeat has been running fast but his true heart has been so  _ slow _ . Uncle’s grief has been so loud, even when he’s not speaking.

Learning to read that second heartbeat helped her learn how to fight firebenders, how to protect herself from attacks that she can’t see, but it isn’t much use when they come from the air, like Azula just did. Azula’s hard to read when she’s on the ground, too, really, because her heartbeat is always so sedate. There’s never any change in her breathing, just a steady, clockwork pace that makes her difficult to predict.

If people hadn’t kept yelling about Azula, Toph wouldn’t recognize her now. Her heartbeat is running wild, both of them, and the screams she’s making don’t even sound  _ human,  _ and if Toph had been out here alone she would’ve thought she was being attacked by some feral animal, or maybe even a dragon. She’s never met a dragon, they’re said to all be dead, but she imagines their heartbeats must feel like what’s rattling in Azula’s stomach now, howling like a monster trapped in a girl’s skin and raging to be free.

She doesn’t hear the war balloon land over the sound of Azula’s hearts, but she hears the way Uncle’s heart jumps in shock at the new arrival, the unfamiliar heartbeat. There’s no second heart, she’s no firebender, but she stands in front of Azula and the fire-heartbeat rages but her true heart starts to slow.

Azula is furious, but at the same time she’s  _ calmed  _ when her mother speaks to her. Toph wonders what it’s like, to feel two such opposite feelings at once. She loves her mother even when the woman frustrates her, but those two feelings can coexist pretty peacefully inside of Toph. They’re not at  _ war _ like Azula’s hearts.  _ If this kinda thing can happen to all firebenders, no  _ wonder _ some of them go so crazy _ .

There’s another double heartbeat, so quiet and weak Toph almost misses it. Someone else is in the war balloon, and they’re a firebender, and they’re barely alive but their weak hummingbee heartbeat is so stubborn that Toph recognizes it only a second before Katara does. 

“Zuko?” Katara cries, her heartbeat rising like an angry wave, and Toph doesn’t get it, the guy’s heart is beating so  _ weakly _ , there’s no way he isn’t seriously injured, can’t Katara  _ see _ that?

“Zuko!” Aang shouts, and his heartbeat flutters in shock, but it’s the first time it’s been at anything other than a sad plod for a while, so she’ll count it as a win. “You’re alive!” Of course Aang sounds  _ happy _ about that, even after the guy turned on them in Ba Sing Se.

“Zuko,” Uncle breathes, and his true heartbeat bursts back like a firework.

~F~F~F~

Uncle is here, and that’s how Zuko knows he’s dreaming again, because Uncle left. Zuko saw the empty cell himself, just before he was captured. The light of the sun on the broken bars was the last sunlight he saw. 

They were in Hira’a, and Mom was there, and now they’re back in the Palace, and Uncle is here, but both Mom and Uncle  _ left _ . They left him behind, and he deserves it for what he did.

“Zuko,” Uncle says, and he’s crying, and his always-warm hands are shaking as he cups Zuko’s cheek. “Zuko, you’re  _ alive— _ ”

“It’s just my face,” Zuko manages to say, because he remembers where he’s seen this before now, Uncle crying over him like this. It was right after he was banished, and all the haze of pain must be from his burn, and that means that they’re on the ship, that’s what the metal all around him is— “We should get off before Zhao blows the ship up, Uncle.”

Uncle’s brows furrow. “We are not on the ship, Nephew. We are in the Palace. You are safe.”

That doesn’t make sense. The Palace isn’t safe. That’s where Father is. “I shouldn’t be here, Uncle, I didn’t catch the Avatar yet, when my father comes back—”

The world is going dark around him, and the darkness means that he’s back in his cell, and Father is coming back, Azula said he was—

“Breathe, Zuko! Listen to my voice and breathe… deep breath in, and out…”

He can still hear Uncle’s voice, and it tethers him, like a light in the dark. He follows it, breathing as he’s told to, and slowly Uncle’s face comes back into view.

“That’s it, Nephew, keep breathing like that,” Uncle says. “Your father is not coming back, Zuko. He is defeated. The Avatar took his bending away. He cannot hurt you now.”

(But that’s all Father  _ does _ .)

“That’s why he wanted me to find the Avatar,” Zuko mumbles, and Uncle gives an odd, choked laugh. 

“You are safe, Nephew. I am here.”

“But you hate me. That’s why you left me behind.” 

Uncle’s eyes are wide now. Is he hurt? Did Father hurt him too? “No, Zuko,” he says, his voice still choked. His hands are holding Zuko’s face tightly now, and it makes his right cheek sting a little, which is odd, because isn’t the burn on his  _ left _ — “I never hated you. I was sad for you, and I have missed you very much. I was worried about you because I thought you were lost. I should never have left you behind. I am sorry, Nephew.”

That doesn’t make sense, either. “No,” Zuko mumbles in confusion. “I— _ I  _ betrayed  _ you _ . I’m so  _ sorry _ …”

“You are forgiven, Nephew,” Uncle chokes out, hugging him tight. “You were always forgiven.”

Zuko doesn’t really know what to do with that, so he looks over Uncle’s shoulder and he can see Mom, she’s still  _ here _ , and she promised she was real and not a dream. They’re all out in the sunlight, not in his cell. The Avatar is here, and he looks tired and bruised and battleworn in a way that Zuko hasn’t seen before, so that’s another point in favour of this being new, this being  _ real _ . His two Water Tribe friends are both here, and they look tired but also ready to kill somebody, which tracks. The little Earth Kingdom girl is here too, and she doesn’t look like she’s about to kill anybody, she’s not really looking at  _ anything _ , she’s just staring into space with a troubled look. None of them are trying to attack him, which is just weird.

And there are other people, too, crowding the courtyard. He can’t put names to faces but he knows many of them, they belong here in the Palace, but the Avatar is  _ right there _ and they aren’t doing anything, and they aren’t doing anything to Uncle even though he’s supposed to be in prison, and they aren’t doing anything to Zuko even though  _ he’s _ supposed to be banished, or in his cell, or  _ something _ —

He doesn’t understand why he is out here in the sunlight, or why Uncle is here and holding him, or why Uncle doesn’t hate him, or why nobody is trying to hurt him. Zuko is tired, and he gives up trying to understand. He clings as best he can to his uncle, closes his eyes, and pretends that he is safe. 

~F~F~F~

_ Ozai is defeated. _

No, that doesn’t make sense. 

_ Ozai is defeated. _

He’s the Fire Lord—no, the Phoenix King. He’s the most powerful man alive.

_ Ozai is defeated. _

How could that be possible?

_ Ozai is defeated. _

If he’s weak enough to  _ lose, _ then what power has he had all this time?

_ Ozai is defeated. _

Has it all been a lie, all her life?

_ Ozai is defeated. _

What power does Azula have?

_ Ozai is defeated, and you are safe. _

Mother is here, and she isn’t dead, so Father isn’t here.

_ Ozai is defeated, and you are safe. _

Mother is here, and she isn’t running away again, so Father isn’t coming back.

_ Ozai is defeated, and you are safe _ .

Azula  _ does _ still have power, she can feel it raging within her, even if she can’t get it out of the trap that these filthy peasants have put her in. 

_ Ozai is defeated, and you are safe. _

Failure does not deserve pity. She’s seen that all her life. 

_ Ozai is defeated, and you are  _ safe.

She’ll wait. She’ll bide her time, as she did when that insipid Dai Li commander locked her up under Ba Sing Se. She still had power then, and she still has power now. The water tribe bitch looks exhausted from whatever it is she did to Azula, turning her own  _ body _ against her, but Azula still feels strong. She can overpower the little savage, and next time, she  _ will _ .

Let them think she is defeated. In time, she will devour them, and reclaim what’s hers. 

Behind her gag, Azula smiles. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been pointed out before that firebenders are the only bender that just sort of make their element out of nowhere sometimes. Air is always all around, and waterbenders and earthbenders are never shown just pulling water and earth out of nowhere (Katara learns to pull water from unusual places, like plants or blood or out of the moisture in the air, but she's still pulling existing water instead of creating it), but firebenders can ignite fire with no fuel as well as controlling existing fire. Aang referred to the fire in The Firebending Masters as being "like a little heartbeat", and then they talked about fire being life, and that combined into the double heartbeat that Toph can perceive, the heartbeat of fire inside of a firebender. I figure it's why Iroh says that one of the key traits of the Fire Nation is that its people are "passionate". It's by no means an excuse for Azula's wild behaviour, but I want to present it as a complicating factor in firebenders managing their emotions, especially since they're learning a warped, anger-focused form of firebending instead of the true firebending taught by the dragons. 
> 
> Anyway, more discussion of that and how everybody feels about Katara bloodbending again in part 2, "If You Can't Fix What's Broken". I realized at the last second that it's not the full moon so Katara shouldn't be able to bloodbend, but I liked that resolution to the fight too much, so y'know what, if some two-bit gangster can do it and can teach his kids to do it with effort and training, I figure one of the greatest waterbenders to ever live can pull it out in a moment of sheer anger and desperation, even if she can't hold it for long.
> 
> Anyway, I figure I owe Iroh and Zuko those hugs by this point
> 
> Part 2 is gonna take a while to finish up, since I had a REALLY clear image of the progression of this fic but only have disparate scenes for that one that I'm still putting in order and linking up. I have a couple other ATLA things I'm gonna post, though, because that's just where my brain is at right now. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed(?) this, and I sometimes yell about the Fire Nation royal family on pillowfort at Chuthulhu, so come join me there to figure out what the fuck is up with that family tree sometime


End file.
